


Remember When We Were Never

by Jelevy (YogurtTime)



Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Canonical history, M/M, Mentions of documented events, Pseudo neuropsychology, Science Fiction, Sex, Speculative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 11:37:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12168084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YogurtTime/pseuds/Jelevy
Summary: When Junno contracts a weird form of amnesia overnight, Koki retraces his steps only to look in the face of someone he thought he knew perfectly.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted March 2013

_For what is denied to love,  
What we have lost in the anticipation,  
A descent beckons, endless and indestructible.  
- **William Carlos Williams**_  
  
  
  
 **The Fight …**  
  
  
Koki laughs, easily, whenever he and Junno are alone.  
  
He and Junno walk alone side by side, evening frost crunching under their shoes. Junno has one hand in his pocket and blows at late autumn leaf flecks that drift too near his face. Koki always has to tilt his head back when Junno walks this close, towering near him like a sharply unsmiling shadow. He’s odd today, sullen, but his eyes shine while the early evening sun rays splash cold on his features. It seems like he was carved to be that strikingly beautiful and the fires of hell will poke icicles through the ground the moment Koki ever tells him that.  
  
“So when are we finally going for that trip?” Junno queries. “You can’t really hate traveling with me that much.”  
  
Koki feels candid, a little high on the energy that comes to them in autumn weather. He makes a deliberately joking expression. “I’ll get over it in five years, probably.”  
  
 _“Five years from now? I don’t see us as friends for_  that  _long.”_  
  
Junno has said worse things. Most times he clearly doesn’t mean them especially when he smiles to alleviate the sting and blurts out a string of words supposed to mean the last was a lie. Just something to say; joking like someone who’d never been taken seriously in the first place.  
  
Koki knows him well enough. He doesn’t know when it happened and while hindsight tells him he knows how  _long_  it’s been, he’d never place a timestamp like that. Like this. Looking at Junno now though, his black gaze is fixed on the passing traffic; he’s not even looking at Koki when he says it, and definitely not smiling.  
  
Koki feels colder. “What, do we have a ‘best-before’ date or…?” He’s startled when he can’t even force a laugh for that one; he can taste it stuck in his throat.  
  
Junno’s languid shoulders shrug, still eyeing the streetlights like he’s counting them. “Well, seasons change, don’t they.”  
  
“All right, you just let me know when that happens, yeah?” Koki winds up barking at him sarcastically.  
  
He’d had three options for things to say before those words: he could have asked him why, could have broken it down with him, could’ve left it alone and but the shock of how much Junno’s shrugging pronouncement hurt, the shock that he hadn’t expected it in  _any_  alternate reality made everything on him burn; branded him with the desire to lash out before Junno could get closer to piercing something else, anything else that might be fatal.  
  
Junno turns to look at him with a wondering laugh. Koki is never sure when Junno’s angry unless he’s looking him in the eye and even then he could be harnessing something else. Something much more volatile. “Heh, well, you’ve always been the one in charge of that.”  
  
Sometimes Koki would look back on this moment and think of a hundred better things he could have said: Halfway intelligent things, things that’d make someone more sensitive than Junno backpedal and apologise, but none of those things come to mind then. Instead he says the very last thing he’d have wanted to hear.  
  
“Fine, then let’s just be done with it.”  
  
An expression slices across Junno’s face. Surprise like he’d just trod on a landmine, heard a deadly ping, stood frozen on the cusp of an explosion. “Eh?”  
  
Koki’s lungs fill with volcanic air; full of rage and hurt. What the hell did Junno expect? “I wouldn’t even be hanging out with you if we weren’t in KAT-TUN. What the fuck else do I have in common with you?”  
  
“…what is this, suddenly?”  
  
He might’ve sworn it off, let it go, forgot how much it hurt, but instead he hisses the words as if to expel the now stark reality of everything falling apart. “I don’t  _want_  to be friends with you anymore.”  
  
When you get into it with Junno, you’re always the one who gets burned. Koki had said that once before; maybe twice. Oh, but the look Junno gives him: Eyes wide in some captivated dismay, an open and honest injury.  
  
 _What the hell just happened? We were perfect a moment ago_. Junno should have demanded that. He should have  _fought_  Koki like the others had, scream until they both couldn’t take it anymore, until it all felt better, until the last few seconds hadn’t happened. Junno wasn’t like that, though, wasn’t like Koki. Instead Junno was Junno. He searched Koki’s face, eyes darting and desperate before he nodded, slowly with an almost infuriating resignation.  
  
He walked away.  
  
Junno would only look at Koki once more after that moment in the parking lot and it was in his rear-view mirror, a parting stare like knives.  
  
  
  
 **Three weeks after the fight**  
  
  
The last time he was here, the furniture had seemed nice, relaxing, firm. Now, though, days later, Koki notices things. Odd edges around the arm rests, worn without care. Red linings faded to a threadbare magenta-- lip stick-like in a way-- in this plain cream-painted room.  
  
No magazines. No television. Not even other people. Just chairs forming an artistic oval in a room with only two doors. Entrance. Exit. Iriguchi, Deguchi.  
  
Koki shuts his eyes, shuts his mind off.  
  
People tend to expect things of certain rooms because of their patterns, because they are imprinted in memory, feelings, temperature; that sort of thing. Koki sits on the edge of the stiff magenta waiting room armchair and wonders why whenever he’s come to this waiting room, he’s always the only one in there waiting.  
  
He rests his arm on the armrest and settles back in the seat; the soft hiss of a cushion filled with foam and metal joining the vindictive buzz of the strips of rectangular light overhead. There aren’t even any of those songs with titles that rest on the tip of the tongue. Just silence and his own breathing. As his head thrums with little gifts of unease, Koki tries to memorise details. He’s become so afraid of  _that_  now. Of feeling like he can’t remember. Because if  _he_  can’t even keep remembering it all, then what’s the point of any of it? Why would he even have come here?  
  
He removes his cap and runs a harried hand through his hair, feeling his fingers clench, tethering a frightened hold on himself. He sits there, staring at an off-white wall that should at least have a picture, a landscape, something to offset the vivid eeriness of empty space.  
  
Buzzer. Muffled voice through the intercom. “Next patient please.”  
  
Koki slides out of the seat, slipping his cap back on low over his eyes, and walks toward the lone white door at the edge of the room.  
  
  


 

 

 

 

*

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Koki doesn’t know much about the science of remembering. He knows things like the senses and their associations; the smell of incense, polished wood, dry, clean fragrances always reminding him of the temples and their lamps and their drums.  
  
He wishes that was all that it took.  
  
Doctor Manabe’s office is the same bland as the waiting room, blank, a desk with nothing on it. Five different shades of beige creep over the walls, all a mess of the mundane. The man behind it is more nerves than the non-descript as he regards Koki a bit shiftily.  
  
Koki drops into the opposite chair and wastes no time in his demand. “So is he eligible?”  
  
Dr. Manabe, all pressed and starched lab coat and furtive bespectacled features, folds his hands. “Well, it may be more complicated of a process than we had estimated. We usually work the treatment for an entire space of time, not specific portions like you've requested.”  
  
It sounds like a rejection and there’s just no way. Koki snaps. "I don't care. We have to-- he's not  _himself_! Those ‘specific portions’ are all of what made him the guy I know…knew. If you're willing to admit that portions of him are missing, then you've got to admit that he isn't whole!"  
  
The doctor gives a patient nod, tilting his head as if to convey the sway in the balance of Koki’s argument. "Well, yes, of course. However, simply saying that would not be cause to gain permissions for this process. The manifesto of this new treatment is conditional to those who are unable to operate in society. All the answers you gave me the first time you came here indicated that he doesn’t qualify. A man  _can_  function without being whole.”  
  
Koki glares. “A real doctor would never say something like that.”  
  
Dr. Manabe gives him a pale smile. “I am not your typical doctor, Tanaka-san. And forgive me for being frank, but it’s come to my attention that it isn’t your friend who would be the one to suffer if his memories can’t be reconstructed."  
  
Koki can’t reply. His panic is climbing, the growing terror that paralyses everything from his chest upward.  
  
“Mental health is a funny thing, Tanaka-san,” Manabe-sensei goes on, removing his spectacles. “Your friend is very lucky to have such an instinctive reaction, so much control over his own files of memory. It may be a positive sign of his mental health that he's actively cancelled out specific unwanted portions.”  
  
He could’ve hit the man for all his smiling words. “It’s  _really_  not. This isn’t something people just up and do like getting a haircut! You can't just cancel something that happened; he can't just cancel whatever the hell he wants; he  _can’t_  just cancel  _me_!”  
  
Manabe-sensei regards him, probably being the psychiatrist at heart, diagnosing Koki with something irreparable. Koki has come to the point where he doesn’t care. He means to fix all this and would pay any amount even if it means taking any job thrown at him from the jimusho.  
  
The doctor sighs at long last. "All right, Tanaka-san. The procedure will go as scheduled. Have him here by 10 p.m. tomorrow.”  
  
  
 **A Day after the fight…**  
  
  
At first, Koki didn’t know what had happened. He went into work the following day dreading having to face him, thinking a simple, cordial nod would do.  
  
Some part of him wanted to go into their small dressing room and kick Junno in the leg before moving to a seat as far from him as he could manage, and the other part wanted to snub him further with any calm gesture that’d show Junno he really didn’t care, that he hadn’t gone home that night and stared at his phone, hadn’t been just a little extra furious with Junno when his usual “Good night!” text didn’t come. As little sense as that made. Whatever.  
  
He went in and it was even worse. Junno had looked up from his magazine directly at Koki and there, splashed across his stark features, was a very bright, socially-conscious, polite smile.  
  
That could have meant anything and Koki averted his eyes and moved straight for Nakamaru, wishing there was a way to kick Junno’s chair without seeming like they were all right. He was  _not_  going to be the first to apologise.  
  
Koki had effectively ignored Junno that whole day and it was frighteningly easy. Frightening because it made him realise how easily their group had once become so used to two other members rarely if ever speaking. Like second nature, they operated smoothly around it. Picking up cues where the moment dropped, chatting a little more lively than was normal. A cheery sense of apathy.  
  
Still, hindsight was hindsight, and it would later occur to Koki how aimlessly quiet Junno had been that whole day.  
  
How could he have known any better?  
  
When he did start to realise, it was in the most inscrutable sort of moment, but for as well as Koki knew Junno, regardless if they weren’t friends anymore, they were still supposed to have a well-rehearsed and mechanical rapport going on.  
  
They were walking towards a location shoot and had passed a line of cars. Junno was respectfully quiet until he leaned around, walking with a bit of a side-step. “I’ve been wondering…” he began, tone light, the type of askance meant for strangers. Koki froze, not expecting Junno to make an approach so soon. “What sort of car do you drive?”  
  
Koki blinked at him. “…What?”  
  
“I like it when sport cars don’t have a hutch back; just seems less pretentious,” he informed Koki, smiling winsomely. “You seem the sport car type, but without a hutch.”  
  
Instinctively Koki stepped away from him. “Is this your way of saying sorry?!” he’d cried, more than incredulous. “Because it’s insane and I don’t accept.”  
  
Junno’s eyes dimmed, like there was something about the way he used to look at Koki that had gone out like a light. He was frowning, mouth all tensed up. “Why would I… say sorry? Did I do something to offend you earlier?”  
  
“Don’t play dumb,” Koki said, point-blank. Not even glaring, just a low, serious murmur. He was fuming. “Not about this, you jerk.”  
  
Junno looked surprised, not injured, and a little embarrassed. “Whatever it is, I’m sorry. We’re meant to work together today and we’re still getting to know each other, so…”  
  
Koki was dumbstruck. “You—“ he began. Then he saw the look on Junno’s face.  
  
An unwavering fact known to Koki was that Junno simply wasn’t a natural actor, certainly not for anything he did in regular, off-camera life. He genuinely had no idea what Koki was talking about. Koki didn’t know what made him ask, but he was struck with the question as Junno looked him in the eye. “What do you mean getting to know each other?”  
  
Junno recovered, seemingly armed with the pause in Koki’s anger. “Yeah, you haven’t noticed we  _never_  work together? We’re all just starting to get along really well and it feels weird that you and I are still like strangers. Ten whole years, eh? Haha, we probably have very little in common.”  
  
Koki had swallowed, unable to manage words beyond the ‘huh?!” on the tip of his tongue. “We… worked together all last week, practically every day…”  
  
Understatement. Junno had crashed on his couch for all of two weeks, always drifting off after his fifth or sixth beer, hugging the assortment of pillows Koki gave him, still sending that idiotic, “Good night!” text when Koki went to his room. He had still done it; even those first few times when he used to sprawl out on the other end of Koki’s bed in just a pair of shorts.  
  
As to what became of that, Koki doesn’t want to think about.  
  
Junno’s mouth made an uncharacteristic moue, thoughtful and a depth that didn’t exist in any Junno expression Koki knew by heart. “That’s impossible. Last week I was off, spent most of it sleeping.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Anyway, let’s try hard for this shoot, OK?”  
  
The immediate, god-awful sting wasn’t just the knowledge that something was horribly wrong, but rather that Koki had—in those fraught, clear-sky seconds--  _expected_  them to be all right eventually. At least, he had thought, they would be OK as soon as Junno said something a little better and Koki knew he would. Junno would puzzle, fret, bother, drop clues and finally work it out because that was what happened when friends fought.  
  
Koki could feel everything that made what they were like a script scrawled deep on the surface of his gut because it was apparent to him—only within that one second— that he didn’t know how he was going to adapt to this loss in front of him. They were  _supposed_  to become friends again eventually; no grudges and they’d resume whatever it was they had had going on before last week. But this man, looking down at him, casual smile and bright eyes like Koki was a new pinpoint for his charm, wasn’t the Junno he knew.  
  
This stranger Junno-- perhaps weirded out by Koki’s crest-fallen, searching look-- chose to move on. Using longer legs to get there at a separating pace, he left Koki staring after him paralysed by a single point of pain, right in his chest; left to understand the agony of a pinned butterfly.  
  
  
  
  
 **A week after the fight**  
  
  
Suspicions and guess-work meant nothing and Koki brought his portable DVD player to work. He was only so lucky that their time spent together—perhaps not their very best, private moments—but at least time in and of itself was documented in audio; video; words. You could pick up a magazine and brandish what was essentially a transcript. Introductory level to You and Me.  
  
Still, like the realities he offered to the fans; it was always tainted with a little lie that bloomed like a stain and blended too well with the truth, a delicious dishonesty smoothie. The true zinger was that the liars were supposed to know the difference.  
  
Even before he sat beside Junno and switched on the player-- an old radio show with just the two of them-- he knew this wouldn’t be enough.  
  
“What’s this?”  
  
Koki set the player on his lap and handed him the earbuds. “It’s us,” he said gruffly.  
  
He seemed bewildered, but he slipped the earbuds in obediently and Koki sat back, watching him, his facial expressions. He’d pulled this one out of archives at random; it was one of those where they’d acted out a beach date together. It had been like being kids again, imagination taking the reins and for the glimpse of the second where it felt real, they would end the attempt with laughter for a straight half minute.  
  
Junno’s brows drew together; he looked puzzled. After a moment, he laughed. “Wow, how long ago was this?”  
  
Heartened, Koki shifted closer to him. “Just last year. We did a lot of these skits.”  
  
A silence as he listened further. “Why don’t I remember this?” he murmured after a protracted second. “You sure that’s me, I sound…”  
  
“It’s you, you and me.”  
  
“Scripted?”  
  
“What? No, no—“  
  
“I don’t remember saying any of these things,” Junno’s tone lowered, looking at Koki with a mild panic. Drowning man.  
  
“Well, it’s you.” Koki wasn’t sure how best to put it, but he was determined to try. Junno was eyeing him with some modicum of curiosity and an old warmth and Koki hated how it made him feel that much relief. He sat a little closer, resting a tentative hand on Junno’s shoulder. “Look, my guess is you probably hit your head somehow, but you’re still my friend. I’m sorry about what happened that night—“  
  
Junno practically interrupted him with his silence. The warmth fled his expression as he appeared quite abruptly on guard, eyes darting away as he pulled the earbuds out carefully. He handed them to Koki in a rather apologetic way, frowning. The Junno  _he_  knew would never say something as firm and sobering as, “That’s not funny,” with that look of distaste on his face.  
  
Koki stopped speaking, momentum slashed to shreds.  
  
Junno got up, but he looked down at Koki, wiping his hands against his thighs skittishly. “Just because we don’t like each other doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with  _me_.”  
  
Koki’s jaw dropped. “Don’t…like each other…? Taguchi, I never said—“  
  
Junno threw up his hands, surrender and a bit of dismissal. “Mah, whatever.” And then he smiled that new polite stranger’s smile—weak, awkward and forced—then with a tone of unease, he moved for the door. “Just tell the others I’ll be back before we start.”  
  
“I wasn’t saying there was anything wrong with you!” Koki barked after him desperately. “But you don’t notice something off? Anything?!”  
  
Junno left the room, avoiding Koki’s stare as he closed the door behind him, a perfect imitation of a man quietly leaving a room with a certifiable headcase in it. Even Koki knew how that had looked.  
  
Ueda walks in a moment later to find Koki on the floor, DVD player in bits at his knees.  
  
  
  
 **Two Weeks after the fight**  
  
  
Koki’s certain if he were still holding the barest minimum of rationality, that side would have had him insisting that Junno  _must_  be pretending, but missing cue responses and distant looks has him scrolling haplessly through a mess of fictions and theories instead; he’d even started to run through search engines on his computer. He pounces on words like ‘amnesia’ and complicated hopefuls that sound like ‘retrograde memory’, ‘disassociation’ and ‘repression’. Koki grows ever more frustrated with the results as more than half of the information he reads deals with situations of trauma and, well, the idea that he possibly  _traumatised_  Junno during their fight was going a bit far.  
  
It happens that everything begins to remind him of it. Songs, thoughts,  _everything_. He spends one evening sitting in his kitchen with a cup of hot chocolate and thinking of how it reminds him of when he’d accidentally spilled some on Junno’s car floor, how even though Junno insisted on going straight to get the carpet cleaned, the smell permeated the walls for a good few days afterward.  
  
Koki is of one mind when he snaps, thinking of memory triggers and misplaced valuables. He retraces walks they’ve taken, trying to remember idiotic jokes, he finds one of Junno’s hats caught under his sofa, wonders how it got there and inexplicably, has to force himself to stop hyperventilating—laughter that flows into a loaded hysteria-- when he considers the most banal reality that he’d never be able to ask Junno what he was doing under his couch with a hat on.  
  
“That idiot,” he says, shaking, breath like gasps against the corner of the sofa cushion.  
  
At rehearsal he watches Junno dancing and even that is different. It’s structured, sharper. He moves precisely without wasting a single movement. It’s uncreative and school-trained and it drives Koki up the wall. They finish and Koki’s been snapped at over and over for messing up. He doesn’t even know what’s happening.  
  
“Taguchi-kun, you’re doing wonderfully today. Loosen up just a little on your spins and it’ll look perfect,” says their choreographer glowingly.  
  
“Bull shit,” Koki hears himself spit from behind and Junno turns and glances at him in some dismay. As non-confrontational as ever, he deliberately doesn’t look at Koki again.  
  
The others are watching Koki with a veritable gallery of sympathetic expressions. He doesn’t understand them, surely some of Junno’s memories of them have something to do with him and he’s clearly forgotten all of those. Cake cream on the floor, ruined road trips, presents and whatever.  
  
“Excuse me,” Junno says briskly, stepping around him, eyes to the ground.  
  
‘ _Taguchi likes me too much_ ’ Koki used to say in interviews, reveling in that incontrovertible evidence of being adored unquestionably. He can feel it now, though, a new habit forming, just him saying things mean enough to get Junno to look at him. Little bitter oasis crumbs.  
  
  


 

 

 

 

*

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He begins to ask doctors; any he could find. He’d step into walk-in clinics every day after work, ducking his head at reception and asking for consultation.  
  
The answers don’t vary. There is apparently a significant precedence for amnesia or out of layman’s terms, retrograde memory loss, but notable cases are always characterised by brain damage to significant features of the temporo-frontal region. It would leave the subject devoid of the ability to retrieve memories leading up to the onset of amnesia. According to study, it comes down to which memory processes had been affected whether it’s a previously automatic action, several experiences, or a specific event.  
  
Koki always eventually finds the question. “What if they remember practically everything about themselves, who they are; where they work, but if they’ve just forgotten specifically about one person?”  
  
And the doctors always appear perplexed, frowning or squinting, offering Koki a studied glance as if to check they weren’t having their leg pulled. “Is it someone the subject has only recently met?”  
  
And Koki’s resigned stammer of, “Well, they’ve known each other almost their whole lives and it’s more like they know we—umm—he knows me, but he can’t remember having spent any time with… me.”  
  
The more practiced doctors would humour him for a while before the queries would run a dead end. More jargon about the facets of memory; how a complicated concentration of experiences and the types of memory processes that are involved would effectively make an amnesia attack of such a nature near to impossible. If they could simply review the actual subject, some conclusions could be made…  
  
“That’s even more impossible,” would be Koki’s reply.  
  
Koki doesn’t know much about neuroscience, to put it plainly, he knows next to nothing on the subject. He finds himself processing any new definition supplied by doctors as simply more noise leading to the conclusion that whatever Junno has just isn’t possible.  
  
After days of this very same thing, it’s Manabe-sensei who calls him in the middle of a meeting that’s running slow. Koki rises quickly to excuse himself. Now normally, Koki wouldn’t answer calls from numbers he doesn’t know, but the name on his screen reads  **OTJ Neurological Research Facility** , which seems promising on its own.  
  
Koki speaks in as muted tones as possible, crouched outside the board room doors. “Who is this?”  
  
“Is this Tanaka-san—ah—Tanaka Koki-san?”  
  
He swallows. “ _Who is this_?”  
  
“I’m sorry, that was rude. My name is Doctor Manabe Hirohito calling from OT J Neurological and Psychiatric Research Facility—“  
  
Koki glances at the door behind him and moves further down the hall. “How did you get this number?”  
  
“Ah, my apologies again. I was calling under the assumption that you were aware many of the specialists you’ve spoken to in the past week have sought referrals for your very unique circumstance.”  
  
Koki pauses in a breathless second. “Can… can you help me?”  
  
“That… will depend, Tanaka-san. This is a very closed-circuit research facility and I’d like to hold our own consultation on the issue to find out whether you, or rather your… sorry, what is your relationship to the subject?”  
  
As his thoughts race and questions flood, Koki feels his back hit the wall behind him, frozen in hope. “My…it’s my friend—co-worker.” Koki shuts his eyes. More than that, definitely, even if they weren’t speaking; it had to be more than that. “My friend,” he concludes, raking fingers through his hair fretfully.  
  
“Understood. When is the earliest you can come in?”  
  
“Today…  _now_ ,” he whispers, clears his throat, and amends. “I can leave work now.”  
  
“Excellent. If you’re ready, let me give you the address…”  
  
  


 

 

 

 

*

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
For a research facility, it’s a small place with several large doors leading to soundless rooms. Koki is guided into Manabe-sensei’s office where he sits perched on the edge of his seat, fidgeting and on guard. It’s how he winds up seated in that awful nondescript office, waiting and clenching the warmth of the room in frenetic anticipation.  
  
If Manabe-sensei recognises him from television, he reveals no sign. “So from the information I have,” he begins, surveying the file in his hand. “Your friend experienced a sudden onset of amnesia, managing to forget a chain of events surrounding you.”  
  
Koki frowned. “Well, it’s complicated. I don’t understand it all myself but he remembers me, knows who I am, but just… he’s forgotten too.”  
  
It’s then that Manabe-sensei looks up, eyes narrowing. “You told me over the phone that you are co-workers; is he knowledgeable of your work relationship?”  
  
He’d thought of the intricacies of this a thousand times, how their work relationship and friendship had interweaved, but somehow the details had been separated with one discarded. “I think so. He remembers his relationship with other people, but we were… different.” He almost says ‘special’ but that just sounds… “He doesn’t remember the time we worked together, the time it was just us… just him and me. I don’t know how to explain it…the other week I—we do this radio program together—I played some clips for him—“  
  
Manabe-sensei’s gaze goes sharp. “Ah, you mustn’t do anything to trigger him abruptly. This is clearly something psychogenic and very likely under a system of repression; anything rash may regress him only further.”  
  
Koki sits up. “You mean you believe me?”  
  
The doctor removes his glasses. “I believed you when I called. You see, Tanaka-san, amnesia as a diagnosis has had a great deal of controversy in its past, namely cases such as yours. I was young when I began my research on obscure mental health complications. Now from what I gather, your friend appears to have what is called Lacunar Amnesia which is to say, a gap in memory. The chain of memories connected to his perception of you has, for whatever reason, been clamped down and cancelled, as it were.”  
  
“Cancelled,” Koki echoes. It’s the first time he’s heard the word in this context and it’s ugly enough to be perfectly accurate. Cancelled is different than forgotten because forgotten sounds like Junno misplaced something, which implies Junno would be looking for whatever he lost. He’s not. “So is it treatable?” he asks after that pouring landfill moment.  
  
Manabe-sensei sighs. “My primary pre-occupation with mental health is that we as physicians are not wholly and truly familiar with the unique and infinite intricacies that make up the brain. Its images and how it affects the body and daily living, and definitely a fascination with memory. In this facility’s most recent endeavours, I have sought to close that gap between the physical humanity to the psychological. There is a treatment in its barest prototype and I’m afraid that I cannot guarantee your friend will be eligible. “  
  
Koki is practically shaking. Being this close to answers; it’s more than he’d hoped for.  
  
“It’s a high-risk treatment, but it’s worked for a little over twenty patients, however,” Manabe-sensei continues. “How do I put this? Mental health is something our society takes for granted a great deal; seeing a psychiatrist for a checkup is nowhere near as socially acceptable as visiting a clinic when you feel you’re coming down with something. I seek to repair some of the stigma with the nature of this treatment. A more accurate analogy for this treatment is-- as Tanaka-san is a car owner—you’ve probably experienced the occasional mysterious vehicle-related malfunction. When that happens, one typically visits a mechanic where he has your car pulled into his garage…”  
  
Koki isn’t sure this is the right analogy, but he nods.  
  
Manabe-sensei folds his hands on his desk. “Now imagine you could do that with your mind. You begin to feel something’s off so you visit the  _thought_  mechanic—me—and he opens a garage where you’re asked to  _park_  your mind. This treatment is operated around said ‘garage,’ which is essentially a cyber-brain and a controlled space where the subject has all of his or her thoughts placed for a temporary sedated space of time with all the safety gear, tools and necessities to begin prognosis and repair.”  
  
Koki is awestruck. “I didn’t know that was even possible…”  
  
The doctor seems gratified, flattered even. “…hence the obscurity of our research. Technology like this can be easily misused and we are very strict about who is eligible.”  
  
“H-how will I know if he’s eligible and—and—“  _How was he going to get Junno to come here?_.  
  
“I will collect your information and whatever information you can supply about your friend and if the case is applicable then I will call you in for an appointment next week where we will work out costs and the like once we’re ready to begin the procedure.”  
  
Koki hasn’t felt such a weight lifted in years. He’s certain Junno  _must_  be eligible somehow as if just the will of his panic would put truth to that. He finally takes a deep breath, sinking into his seat. “You know, when I was looking into this, it didn’t look hopeful. I mean, he and I worked together since we were kids and it just seems crazy that he’d know only that while filling in all those blanks with whatever he has going on with our other band members.“  
  
Manabe-sensei has closed his files, and he appears to be asking purely out of curiosity. “Band members?”  
  
Koki nods. “Yeah, there’s five of us, an idol group. He remembers the others just fine, his friendship with them and whatever. I dunno.” He laughs a little, having run through the specifics in his mind over and over, still not getting it entirely. “It’s like he turned me into some type of unimportant background image always around—“  
  
Manabe-sensei re-opens the file abruptly. “How long exactly have you both been members of this band?”  
  
Koki pauses. “A little over ten years, but we met when we were fourteen.”  
  
The doctor’s countenance changes; much more etched with concern than before. “I’m sorry, I had assumed when you said co-workers that this was a relationship measuring a recent stretch of time. To say you’ve known him for over ten years alters the circumstance significantly.”  
  
Koki leans forward in his chair, fixing the doctor with a steady look. “What do you mean?”  
  
“Well, the nature of memory storage comes in stages. The brain rewires at a junction in a young person’s development; his memories before and after are not a chain, but actually quite isolated from each other. If you claim that he’s forgotten several isolated incidents between then and now, well, the treatment might not be as applicable as I previously assumed.”  
  
Koki felt the floor swoop out from under him. “But—“  
  
“Still,” Manabe-sensei moved on. “I will insist on looking into the situation and deciding whether the treatment will do him any good or if the damage is irreparable. Come back next week, the same time and we will deliberate a plan of action…”  
  
A plan of action. Koki can only hope to be that necessary to putting Junno back to the way he was, the oncoming divide between them and the full scope of what their fight had meant all included.  
  
  
  
  
 **Three Weeks after the fight**  
  
  
Koki is one of the few who knows Nakamaru loves the park in the autumn. Yucchi rarely talks about it because, well, one can only imagine the perplexing notion of taking a walk in the park and spotting an idol at his ease. Simply put, Yucchi could sit on those park benches for hours, tossing bits of rice cracker to pigeons and ducks as he taps his foot and startles the more craven birds with his sudden beatbox riffs along with whatever’s playing on his iPod. He used to sit in his car in the lot, until he was a target of suspicion by the locals.  
  
Koki also knows to find him there on Sundays usually-- just after filming for  _Shuichi_ \-- when he’s much more willing to chat at length when he’s just ending a work week.  
  
Of course, they’d all tried to broach the subject with Junno, but Junno would humour them for only a little while before changing the topic with swift clarity, smiling agonisingly sweet smiles as he waved off their questions. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” and “If this is a prank, it’s not a very good one.” Still, Koki doesn’t know how to tell the others what he needs to do. Some part of him feels that they’d tell him to leave Junno as he is before someone notices something off. Koki finds himself demanding whether anyone else can see how different Junno is.  
  
"Sure he's different," Nakamaru says to him, flicking a cracker crumb at a duck that wanders close. "It's distinct enough that  _we_  notice, but not enough for it to clash with work."  
  
And it doesn’t make sense. How everyone else has worked their way around it while Koki feels like he hasn’t breathed properly in weeks. How everyone else addresses this calmly while sometimes when he’s alone, when Koki thinks about the whole thing as it is, he thinks that he’s on the verge of a snap, that’s he’s going to lose it soon because it’s just too intricate and impossible. It could happen to anyone else, but him. And always last, he would then think of that night, their argument and how dazed and stricken Junno had looked, getting into his car and driving off.  
  
It’s always in those moments alone that Koki tries to take back what he said. Penitence being what it is.  
  
Koki stares at the pond across from them; watches the swarm of green algae and moss divide and break. “He did it to punish me,” he says, coming to the conclusion like it had been whispering about his head all along.  
  
He feels Nakamaru twist to look at him; his brown complicated gaze more piercing than he could possibly know. “Seems to me,” he says, raising a hand to the upper part of Koki’s arm, pressing instead of grasping. Poignant contact. “It seems more like self-harm, if you ask me. Odd sort of self-involved punishment got the both of you.”  
  
Koki turns, leaning back on the park bench in an exhausted heap, feeling the beginnings of hope slice right through his middle. He considers telling Yucchi what he’s planning; about the treatment he found; about having to abduct Junno this evening after the PV filming. “Yucchi…” he begins to say.  
  
Nakamaru sniffs, looking up at the bare winter trees with careful neutrality. “Anyway, this horrible business hasn’t made his jokes any better.”  
  
  
  
A PV, seemed—if anything—an ironic thing for them to be working on together while they were like this. The dance, the otherwise eye contact it required them to have, and worst of all, the cameras all over the damn place. Koki gets it-- well, they all do -- the point of the cameras on them. It’s because the fans don’t just want cinematography to go with their CD collection at home, they want some reality. Yes, ironic. Reality was never the sort of thing their group had the luxury to share, but they’re pretty practiced at offering their own brand of tongue-in-cheek reality.  
  
The differences in Junno are more pronounced today after this much time and Koki’s effort to keep things normal--such as sharp remarks when Junno says something cringe-worthy-- is met with some difficulty when, instead of his ringing and automatic laughter at Koki’s diatribe, Junno shoots him a hunted look.  
  
Now, less inclined to ‘get to know’ Koki, Junno averts his gaze, treats him with a careful neglect. They’re co-workers; not even band mates and Koki of all people has long ago learned the difference the hard way. And yet, between Junno’s silences for Koki, Koki sees how he appeals to the other members, salting a wound with his idle chat. He likes to bother Nakamaru the most, laughing raucously at his softer witticisms, tries to force inside jokes that aren’t ever going to happen, and worst of all, asking Nakamaru out for drinks…  
  
“I’ll teach you how to play billiards.”  
  
Met with Nakamaru’s deadpan. “Hmm, we’ll see.”  
  
“Today; let’s go today.”  
  
And Nakamaru being ever calm and evasive. “I might have a few things to do…why not ask Koki?”  
  
“Mm… don’t tell him I told you this, but…” Junno wavering and Koki, far enough to pull off feigned distraction with the props, keeps listening. “He makes me uneasy; the way he’s always angry all the time like that. I mean—well—you sure you don’t want to go?”  
  
Koki looks over at them again. Junno’s back is to him and Nakamaru has his arms folded loosely, regarding Junno with severe disquiet. “…perhaps another time, OK?”  
  
“Yeah, OK, when?”  
  
Nakamaru’s wary gaze meets Koki’s over Junno’s shoulder right then.  
  
Koki the eavesdropper, and he feels all the more idiotic because for every exchange he’s heard, all he can think of is who could ever possibly adjust to Junno’s attention the way he had. The way he’d learned to interpret that frustrating persistence as nothing more than enthusiasm and short-lived investment in an idea; the same way he’d learned to free up his schedule sometimes because there was no doubt Junno would turn up at his door when he was completely out of excuses.  
  
The very worst thing about it, though, is the fear Junno’s behavior incites in Koki. Like he’s watching someone make the motions of drowning standing upright on dry land. It makes him mentally backpedal each time immediately because it’d be worse to think it means that some part of Junno misses him, that there was a part of Junno that fought the side who could cancel him out.  
  
How funny. Because that would probably be in a world where Junno needs Koki more than Koki needs him. A world where Koki is practiced and willing to drop the people he’s already worked so hard not to care about.  
  
  


 

 

 

 

*

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He times it so they’re alone when he approaches, which only means he ends up following Junno to the parking lot. He remembers hearing footsteps behind him on this concrete a hundred times and knowing Junno was right behind him, smiling on the verge of saying something stupid he’ll never quite get out before Koki would pretend to only just notice him. Looking at the long, strong line of Junno’s retreating back, oblivious to Koki, the way he holds his bag at his shoulder, seemingly in such good humour has Koki in a state of high irritation.  
  
“Taguchi!” he says and it comes out too sharp of course.  
  
Junno, still a master at the coldest look when his attention’s distracted, swivels about, still walking. “Hm?” he says and sees Koki, then, “Oh. Yeah?”  
  
Koki fights off every scrap of his own pride as he forces a smile. “I was just wondering. What I mean is, like, I’m sorry about earlier and…umm, how I’ve been—“  
  
A commiserating smile. “You  _have_  been pretty weird.”  
  
Koki bites his own tongue, taking a few seconds to regroup. “Yes. That. You want to go for a drink?”  
  
Junno purses his lips, looking at his watch. “Well, I dunno. I mean, not for long, I have stuff to do.”  
  
Koki knows for a fact that Junno hasn’t got anything planned aside from video games and anime. Koki had come to learn this only a few weeks after they’d started hanging out. He calls on the powers of deep virtue to keep himself from mentioning this. Koki doesn’t know how to appeal to this version of Junno. Previously, he’d only have to tug him along by the arm, shirt or whatever. Now Koki only has smiles and those are beginning to hurt. “Come on, just a couple of beers; we’ll talk. I-it’ll be nice.”  
  
Junno looks puzzled. “Well, first of all, I don’t drink beer, but if you’ll buy me a couple shots, we’re good.”  
  
Koki has to literally turn his back, crossing his arms, trying to make the motion casual as he feels his insides start to seize up again. He won’t be breathing the next second. A Junno who doesn’t declaim his love for beer? It’s so meaningless, and so not the nucleus of Koki’s panic; he just doesn’t know why, but that’s the last straw.  
  
“Ohh.” His voice breaks when he’s looking up at Junno again, smile like a muscle about to snap. “That’s cool with me.”  
  
If this doesn’t work; if he can’t get Junno to that lab tonight…  
  
  
  
Junno probably knows he’s staring. He knocks back tequila in tall shot glasses, eyes shutting as he slips the lime wedge between his lips. Once he emerges on a wince, Koki is still staring at him. Junno smiles a little shyly, eyes still averted; mouth all red, and Koki picks up his glass, taking a venomous gulp if only to look elsewhere as well.  
  
He’s involuntarily thinking of over a year ago when he’d come to the alarming perception that tipsy Junno was the exact same person as sober Junno. And when, on a more sober occasion—a midafternoon on a Tuesday with Junno at his door with his forty-two pack; plus already pink-cheeked and smiling a fever up Koki’s chest -- Koki had realised you had to be sober to see the difference.  
  
“Man, it’s pretty crowded in here,” this Junno remarks, folding one leg over the other as he sits like he’s never had to care about anything. “Mm, I’ll get the next round then?”  
  
This version of Junno is a dull drinking partner or it could be that he’s with Koki, marking everything not said in their silence all about how supposedly uncomfortable Koki makes him. Koki’s forcing smiles and god, he never does that.  
  
“Cool,” he says.  
  
Junno returns with a tray, three shots and a tall glass of lager. He hands Koki his glass before he turns just a little away, and watches the dance floor, tapping his foot to the generic tune in the backbuzz of the pub’s noise.  
  
“You know,” Junno says, finally looking at him. Finally. “I’ve rarely been out with any of the other members…”  
  
Koki bites his tongue so he won’t correct him. “Yeah?”  
  
“It’s weird though,” he goes on. “I feel like—I don’t know—I must have blacked out but did we… did we all go out for dinner during one of the tours.”  
  
Koki stares, frozen again. He opens his mouth and the voiceless, “Yes,” that comes out makes Junno’s brows crease. Koki can’t even bear this; how is he going to… “Yes,” he repeats. This time like a normal person.  
  
Junno’s laugh falters when it bubbles up and Koki is in pieces inside. “I remember flashes of it,” he says. “I keep thinking you were there and then…and then...”  
  
 _God_. Koki has to grip his glass so his hands don’t shake. “We went for a walk once, after the dinner. It was just us by the bay; y-you told me about your yacht and we talked about fishing—“ He sees Junno’s jaw go tight and he quickly adds. “You were pretty plastered, so I didn’t think you’d remember it anyway.”  
  
Junno’s next laugh is real. “Ah, how embarrassing. Getting that drunk when it’s one of the first times we hung out.” His eyes shine before they vanish, eyes shut from his broad smile, glittering. “Sorry,” he adds, cavalier and sweet.  
  
“You don’t have to apologise,” Koki mutters and Junno looks amused by how earnest Koki sounds.  
  
There’s a birthday going on near the bar, starting a burst of singing. Someone pulls a cracker and they both jump. Koki swears and Junno shoots him a secretive grin like they’d just shared something. Koki could hate him for that.  
  
They go silent again, but this time Junno sits facing towards him, looking like he’s searching for something pointless to say, trying at least.  
  
“Is there anything else you don’t remember?” Koki asks quickly, getting the words out before he can think it through. He shouldn’t be doing this. He should  _not_  be doing this.  
  
Junno is shaking a line of salt on his wrist and he flickers a stolen glance at Koki. “Well, there is one thing—I don’t even know if it’s really that serious, but…”  
  
Koki tries not to move, as if afraid that any movement might betray his sudden anxiety. “What is it?”  
  
He licks the salt up, leaving a gleaming line up the hard vein of his wrist, and throws back the tequila, closing his lips over the wedge somewhat voraciously. “Well,” he murmurs, flinching. “I think sometime during my off days couple weeks back, I had a blackout there too.”  
  
Koki is so still, he’s barely breathing. “Is…that so?”  
  
Junno nods. “Like I must’ve thrown a party at my place the night before or…or even hours before that… like I woke up on my bathroom floor and my apartment was a mess; my stuff was everywhere! I don’t throw parties like that normally, but it’s the only way with all the beer cans, overturned tables and the broken window—definitely not gonna do  _that_  again,” he concludes like he’s told a funny story, chuckling ruefully.  
  
“You’re saying this was three weeks ago?” Koki feels ill already.  
  
“Yeah, it took me days to get everything back in order…”  
  
Koki can picture it, an alive image and whatever happened that night when he’d left Koki. Junno’s usually pristine apartment in shambles, a perfect wasteland of violence and it’s a horror-filled pause in his mind. He feels like some part of him should be gratified but he’s swimming in too much nausea to feel anything else. “What if it wasn’t a party,” Koki says, looking at how Junno’s pupils seem a wide distance circumference. “If you could find out what happened that night, would you?”  
  
Junno’s smiling at him for real, a taken look splashed in there from the number of shots he’s had. He can’t do it. It’s wrong, but the justifications scream in his head. Koki pushes the other tequila shot glass toward Junno.  
  
“I mean it’s not that serious…” He pauses, thinking on the concept carefully for some silent seconds. “I don’t know. Yeah, yeah, I would. Maybe I was robbed haha…”  
  
He’s already drunk and rambling and Koki thinks that that will have to do. “Take your shot, man,” he mumbles.


	2. Two

  
  
  
When they step outside in the night air, Junno is laughing and Koki gestures toward his car. “Got some water bottles in there. Let’s go sober up a bit, then I’ll drive you home.”  
  
Junno beams, and hesitant hands plant on his shoulders from behind and it’s the same, only different and every sore spot he could conjure in his imagination. “You’re sweet to me when you’re drunk,” he slurs, practically all giggles.  
  
Koki tries not to freeze up and push him off. “ _You’re_  drunk,” he replies.  
  
Junno laughs at him, and Koki has to open the car door for him, the backseat, and Junno tries to get in, grabbing the top to slip into the seat. “Knew you’d have a sport car,” he gasps, laughing when his foot slips and he topples backward.  
  
He grabs Koki by the jacket and apologises distractedly, looking right at him. The bar lights and the street lights mix a glowing yellow brightness on Junno’s features through the back window. Even in all smiles, his stare is bright and disarmingly sensual when Koki is this close. “My jacket, Taguchi, let go—“  
  
“We should go see my yacht,“ he hiccoughs complacently and he reaches out, acting like it’s a buddy hug and Koki remembers these. “Plan a cool fishing trip.”  
  
Junno has him practically in a weak chokehold, fingers gripping his jacket and yeah, Koki remembers these. Except that this time they’re in the fucking backseat of his car; except this time, he can’t pull back; except this time, he can’t stop staring at Junno in desperate panic. Koki is caught in an unfortunate memory. Another time he was leaning over Junno like this and their world was shaking around them because one of them was about to cross a terrible, wonderful line.  
  
And there, as Koki tries furiously to shut his own memory off, for a brief, very tiny second, he's staring down at familiar eyes, pools of black that keep his reflection and Koki can see himself there. Junno’s smile is more real than it’s been in weeks and Koki feels like Junno can see him wholly.  
  
"Junno?" Koki whispers, uncertain and on bated breath.  
  
Junno blinks slowly. "What is it?"  
  
Koki scrambles away quickly.  
  
As he slides behind the wheel, Koki has already convinced himself that the little reflection of himself he saw in Junno's pupils for that slight second should be a signal, the clue he'd been hoping for that he’s doing the right thing.  
  


 

 

 

 

*

  
  
  
  
  
  
It’s already fifteen after ten when Koki pulls into the front of the research facility. They’re already late.Junno’s half-lucid, slouched in the back and he becomes very compliant, letting Koki take some of his weight on his shoulder as he drags him through the doors.  
  
The room allocated for the procedure is more like a mixture between a surgical theatre and a morgue. Koki is immediately in a state of disquiet as Manabe-sensei wheels in the equipment and a couple of orderlies strap Junno onto what looks like an upright dental chair.  
  
“What are you gonna do to him?” Koki asks, standing awkwardly by the swinging doors.  
  
Manabe-sensei is sweeping rubber sheets off the equipment next to Junno and doesn’t turn to look at Koki. “Is he intoxicated?” he queries distractedly.  
  
“Yes. That’s… not going to interfere with the treatment, is it?” He feels like an idiot.  
  
The orderlies roll in another chair not far off from Junno’s position where Manabe-sensei sits and dons a pair of gloves. “Actually no, it might even help him take to the procedure. This is a mental wavelength examination rather than anything to do with his inhibitions.”  
  
“Right,” Koki breathes. “How is it done?”  
  
“I will explain as I commence the procedure. I want you to be entirely privy to the process as we are not yet an applicable service for waiver contracts. He, on the other hand, will need to sign a few things if we are successful.” His assistants drag up a dome-shaped object still covered in its rubber sheet between the doctor’s chair and Junno’s. Koki looks uneasily at Junno’s face. He’s far gone and leaning his head contently against the headrest, all sighs and soft snores.  
  
Koki makes a noncommittal sound.  
  
“Tanaka-san, there is a door to your left that will admit you to a stairway that’ll lead to a viewing room where you can sit and observe from there. You will be able to hear and see everything,” he motions, unearthing what appears to be a long, thin needle attached to an odd tube.  
  
Koki nearly trips over his own feet to get out of that room, to abscond from the idea that he is in any way connected to this process. He grabs the banister as he hurries up the steps, dropping himself into a tiny, neat armchair identical to the very one in the waiting room even in wear. Koki thinks about the nature of the facility, how there’s never anyone here and yet the furniture is worn, the floors polished to their shallowest. He’s only aware now how horrifically scary this all is.  
  
“Now, Tanaka-san, if you’ll observe, the tube I’m holding is called Econtra-Lacuna and it’s connected to a hypodermic needle containing …”  
  
Koki practically tunes him out as he stares at the glass separation between him and Junno’s stretched out form. Manabe-sensei is speaking as he swivels the dome-shaped thing and removes its rubber cover. It’s made of glass, filled with a clear dark red fluid set at a strange boil, massive bubbles sweeping towards the top and sitting at the bottom; the very center of the contraption is what Koki unmistakably sees is an isolated human  _brain_. From the brain are several small clamps and attachments leading out various tubes full of the same red fluid gushing in and out. The doctor holds up an intravenous bag before hooking it on its stand. He is steady-handed as he folds Junno’s navy blue sweater sleeve up and presses a thumb to the crook of his arm before the needle slips under.  
  
Junno stirs and Koki gets up, palms to the glass. There’s a buzzing in his ears and he can’t stop this, not when they’ve come this far. It isn’t right. It wasn’t right bringing him here and he’s not doing anything to stop it.  
  
“This better fucking work,” he breathes more to himself than Manabe-sensei, forehead pressed to the glass.  
  
“…and once he is appropriately lax and sedated, the most essential point of the procedure can begin.” Manabe-sensei holds up the tube with the needle so that Koki can see it clearly. “The injection. Our research has speculated that the precise position of the memory consolidating-- or  _processing_ , as it were-- tissue is with the amygdala. The amygdala is where I will be injecting the first tube and when the time is right, I will inject the second to his hippocampus. Our aim is  _reconsolidation_  in which we both find and rewire the cancelled memory chain back to its initial processing state—the learning space, as I often call it. Once it is in that learning space, it will simply be like pressing the restore button on your computer’s recycle bin.”  
  
Koki nods, holding his breath as Manabe-sensei takes hold of a white, round remote the size of a small stone. With one press, Koki sees the long needle at the end of the tube begin to retract in a robotic motion. The doctor methodically pinches the bridge of Junno’s nose and begins to feed the thin tube up his left nostril at a slow and almost train-wreck pace. Koki wants to look away, but the sight is so alarming that he can’t tear his eyes away. The tube edges further in until it’s a taut cord connected to the dome that Koki can now see is attached to one of the various tubes going into the brain.  
  
Manabe-sensei hits the button on his little remote again and Koki jumps back as every muscle on Junno’s body tenses his body stretches into a firm arch off the chair. “Just a reflex; nothing to worry about,” Manabe-sensei murmurs. “We are now attached. And I will hit the ‘flood’ switch which will begin to flood bursts of memory trace cells into the Econtra-Lacuna Isolated Brain. You’ll notice that I, of course, will perform my part completely lucid so as to remain at my wits as I explore his memory traces.”  
  
Koki chooses to look away as the doctor injects a second tube, the very same way, letting it feed up his nostril. “Now,” he says. “Now, I shall begin.” On these words, Manabe-sensei leans back in his shorter reclining chair and shuts his eyes, leaving Koki to blink at their silent, prone forms, himself utterly wordless.  
  
It’s probably only tento twenty minutes before Koki sits back down in the armchair and only a few minutes after that before he’s dropped off, sideways in the chair. He knows if he’d managed to stay awake, he’d have expired from the anxiety.  
  
  
Koki wakes to being shaken. It seems a wild, dream-filled moment that he hears someone with a silly, but outrageously ecstatic tone call his name. He opens his eyes, a smile already tugging at his mouth.  
  
It’s Manabe-sensei calmly shaking him with a somber. “Tanaka-san, please wake up.” His gloves and lab coat are gone and he’s standing over Koki’s chair. Koki sits up, looking around quickly for Junno. He sees him before Manabe-sensei speaks however. Junno is still lying prone, flushed and sleeping in that odd dentist’s chair with the tube still hooked in.  
  
“Did you—“ Koki begins; his mouth is incomprehensibly dry.  
  
Manabe-sensei slips his hands in his pockets. “I’m afraid I have. I’ve just finished; however, I have to report, with my deepest regret, that the procedure was unsuccessful.”  
  
Koki’s eyes widen. “What…  _What?_!”  
  
The doctor offers a sympathetic nod. “He is all right, of course. Still the same state you brought him in, unfortunately. His memory traces have taken on odd shapes, the cells are complicated to locate if the image is wrapped in riddles. There is far too great a risk involved for me to delve further. Of course, given its evident lack of success, the facility will not hold you to any payment…”  
  
It’s like background noise. His only hope, the very last thing he can or would be able to think of to fix Junno is a bust. “He—He can’t stay like that…” His voice is still gruff from sleep and it feels raw in his throat, smoked up with burning coals of pressure. “That’s not him.”  
  
“I am deeply sorry, Tanaka-san. You took the right course of action in giving it a try…”  
  
Presently, it’s all he can do to keep from seizing the doctor by his shirt and demanding he try again because, for fuck’s sake, it  _can’t_  be a lost cause. “Why is he still all hooked up?” he asks numbly instead.  
  
“Right now the memory trace fluid—full of the figurative engram cells-- is travelling back through the E.L. tube back into his amygdala,” Manabe-sensei explains. “It’s a thirty-minute process as the cells regroup upon re-entry. His sedatives will last for just that long to an hour, if you’d like to be with him when he wakes up.”  
  
Koki won’t look at him. If he catches even a glimpse of that sympathy, he’ll probably go to pieces, probably find a justifiable reason to beg, but this is no regular circumstance and just—god, he had such faith that it would work, fate and happenstance being what they are. “Yeah, I’ll go be with him.” He sounds like someone else as he says it.  
  
Manabe-sensei stands not far off. A medical professional’s distance. “I have a second appointment just now. One of the orderlies will be in to detach the tube before he wakes.”  
  
Koki nods, watching the rise and fall of Junno’s chest as the tube pulsates with each breath. Then he watches Manabe-sensei go through the surgical theatre, collect his lab-coat and walk out the doors.  
  
When Koki goes into the theatre, he isn’t thinking. He looks at the equipment, sees the switches flicked down to ‘drain’, trays of hypodermic needles labelled ‘to attach: Econtra-Lacuna’ and the rolled up coil of tube all clear near the disinfectant station and still hooked into the brain’s dome machine. Koki is looking at all these when it clicks like a beat of things dark and things light. It doesn’t take a pause or any added contemplation or doubt before Koki is slipping a needle into the coiled tube. He watches Junno as he flicks the switch from ‘drain’ to ‘flood’, watches for any confirmation that this is as bad an idea as he already knows it is.  
  
“The crazy shit I do for you,” he mutters bitterly at him, but he’s already sitting in the chair and Junno looks as serene as ever.  
  
He looks around for the small remote and he’s far past the beginnings of fear as he hits the needle control. The needle hums as it goes in at a controlled pace. Koki brings the closed crown of the tube’s end towards his nose. His fingers shake and his other hand, gripping the arm of his chair, trembles involuntarily. It tingles at the first touch to his skin, and while Koki had thought it had been Manabe-sensei himself feeding the tube upward; instead the tube goes rigid once it touches inside his nostril and it begins to snake its way up.  
  
Koki clenches his teeth, and tries not to make a sound as the robotic control in it arches and he can feel it, digging up, wriggling. The backs of his eyes go hot as they start to water and he feels something contract and pulse against a tender surface that makes him start to taste metal at the back of his throat. It brings an instant sickness as he leans back against the chair, still shaking. It’s painful and uncomfortable and he hasn’t even set the needle. His breaths come in short, panicked gasps through his teeth as his thumb hovers over the button. He can feel the tears coming, uncontrollable, sharp pain squeezing them out, and he bites back a whimper as he brings his thumb down.  
  
It’s like a sharp, instantaneous migraine, and his stomach churns as his head nerves explode with fire. Koki falls back on the chair, unable to fight the cry that spills out. He can feel the pain fading to a shallow, watery throb as he unclenches his fists and looks around the room. His eyes are blurry from tears but that’s all that’s different. He sighs, looking to his right at an almost red-shaded Junno behind the glass of the dome. It occurs to him that the last thing Manabe-sensei did before beginning was to close his eyes, so Koki does just that.  
  
And absolutely nothing happens.  
  
  


 

 

*

  
  
  
  
  
  
He lays there, aware of the silence, aware that this was an all-around stupid thing to do. He keeps his eyes screwed shut and wonders what will happen when he gets caught. The pain is gone now and it’s left him a little dizzy. His center of gravity is like he’s floating upward, and Koki takes a deep breath, aiming to stay focussed for whatever’s coming.  
  
It’s the nothing in that one breath. Koki tries to inhale again but his lungs feel full already, stuck and constricted. He can feel himself kick and struggle, hands moving for his neck as he chokes, and his cry seeps from his mouth in a hot bubble. It’s such a real, tangible feeling that Koki opens his eyes, almost expecting to see his last remaining gulp of air slip from him into the air of the room. What he does see has him scrambling back and his arms flailing helplessly.  
  
Water. There’s water everywhere; he’s deep with no more than a dimmest trace of light that he can’t even see the room, the lab, or Junno. He could be in the centre of an ocean for all it’s so dark. With his chest exploding with panic, Koki begins to swim up, kicking his legs as hard as he can, but a floating weight drags him downward for every stroke of his arms. The little bubbles of air trickle down into the depth and he realises the faint light is coming from under him. He’s so desperate for air, he swings his weight so his legs float up and it’s with an alarming ease that he begins to go down; further and further like there are weights attached to him. His ears are ringing and every tendon and muscle in his body begins to burn as he rushes deeper, the light bursting across his skin.  
  
It’s an intense vertigo; the world flipping as the air shooting into his lungs sears his chest like fire. Koki half-sobs as he drinks it in, kicking his legs to stay above water. He finds his head thrown back, gaze fixed to the sky to keep from swallowing any more. Then he sees what is  _supposed_  to be the sky but seems more like a kid’s drawing in scribbles of blue; just long stretches of white and marker ink scratched over it in messy lines. His eyes feel blurred as he tries to look around for something to grab onto, but all he sees are the waves growing in his direction, thrusting him up before trying to swallow him. As the third wave comes over him, Koki is struck with the very odd and sudden thought that he can’t possibly be in the ocean because the icy water slashing across his face isn’t salty. Koki treads water, twisting himself around so when the next wave breaks, he can see further.  
  
Along the horizon line, Koki sees a white something in the distance emitting a low hum that only grows noisier as it comes closer. He spits out another mouthful of water as he practically dog-paddles toward it, watching it grow bigger as it approaches. From what he can see as it gets closer, it’s a boat; a motorboat.  
  
It’s bigger than he expected and it casts a shadow over whatever hot light is shining down on him. It’s a trembling moment as Koki can barely choke out the feeble, “Help!” he manages at the sight of a human-shaped shadow peering over the edge of the boat.  
He flounders, strength long ebbed, before he feels a pair of hands grab for his upper arms; hauling him up until he’s sliding up the side of the boat. The next moment, he’s dropped unceremoniously on the deck of a very familiar-looking yacht.  
  
Pushing his hair out of his face and out of breath, Koki looks up to see Junno standing over him. He’s far from surprised that it’s Junno. What  _does_  surprise him is how Junno looks. He could be staring at a moving, carefully edited photograph. It’s like every single flaw that used to exist in stark relief, every one that Koki had memorised down to his crooked mouth, is softened. His sleeves are pushed around his shoulders and his jeans, folded up so every inch of his exposed skin is a sun-struck mahogany with cut and careful musculature inked over his calves and biceps. Koki doesn’t even know where not to look.  
  
Even just from the way the nonexistent sun casts shadows over his features is flattering enough that Junno’s eyes seem deeper, so black they seem to be silvery and reflective. And Junno’s mouth-- now making an uncertain frown-- is less wide. The carefully sculpted line of his lips seems more heavily defined like someone had taken a chisel to redraw it, adding fuller, pinker lips. Koki comes to the awed and silent conclusion that this… is most likely the way Junno imagines he must appear to people.  
  
“What are you doing?” Junno is saying, looking the perfect part of innocent and nonplussed.  
  
Koki practically deflates with relief, sprawling on his back on the deck. “I’m looking for  _you_ ,” he pants, kicking his water-filled shoes off.  
  
“In the middle of the ocean?” Junno asks. He’s laughing at him and his laughter is different, still loud, but it rings with a self-indulgent, rich cadence. It’s then that it strikes Koki how Junno’s teeth are still the same and just--nothing really makes sense.  
  
“This is  _not_  the ocean,” he snaps. “Look at the sky; the water’s not salty. None of it is real, Taguchi.”  
  
Junno turns his back; quite unruffled by this statement as he tilts his head up to observe the sky. “Just ‘cause it’s not normal doesn’t make it not real. Anyway, everything fell apart a while ago; this was what it became when it tried to rebuild.”  
  
Koki tries not to look guilty. “That might be my fault.”  
  
Junno makes a limber bound up the side of the yacht to get to the helm, naked arms pulling his entire body up in a couple quick motions. “Might it?” he calls through the wind that doesn’t exist. “Well, you can tell me all about it while I sail us back to land.”  
  
When Junno becomes more distracted with the wheel, Koki climbs the ladder to the helm. He perches in the sill beside Junno and looks at him again; squinting past the blurred lines that were once all of those vivid flaws. He just hadn’t expected to find Junno so quickly and it feels like where his relief should be, there’s only an overwhelming sense that everything about him is off. Koki is aware that this might not be the ‘right’ Junno and that there is no guarantee that there will ever be a ‘right’ Junno to find. Somehow it’d turn out to be that the guy who doesn’t remember him and the one that did are likely both the same person; neither interchangeable for the other.  
  
Still though, Junno seems, if anything, the way he normally would be given the obscure circumstance that he’d happen upon Koki in the middle of an ocean. He even throws an invasive smile back at Koki as if it’s something burning he expects Koki to catch. It fills Koki with a helplessly happy resolve to be honest. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly and Junno throws the wheel to the right, and the watercraft careens, splashing up a perfect wave. “You couldn’t remember anything about me… about us. It wasn’t right and I had to bring you to the research facility.”  
  
Junno has his eyes fixed on the still endless stretch of water ahead. “Is that the reason someone came in; the man who tried to fiddle around here without my permission?”  
  
Koki swallows. “You’d said you wanted to remember, but you remember now, right?”  
  
Junno doesn’t answer. The sky ahead of them begins to bleed blue. Thick droplets slide down a canvas like someone had taken a dripping wet paint brush and shoved it angrily against the page. Junno starts to sing under his breath as the blue seeps into the water like dye spreading, turning the imitation of the Pacific green to a sapphire.  
  
“Because if you do, then it’s all OK now,” Koki goes on. “We can get out of here and I’ll do whatever it takes to make up for it. I admit it wasn’t actually the  _moral_  thing to do…” He trails off as Junno turns and fixes that smile on him, shaking his head.  
  
“Quit worrying so much, you,” Junno says warmly. “In fact, I should probably thank you. You’re gonna make it OK again, right?”  
  
Koki watches him. He could swear he’d just heard the irony in Junno’s tone, but it could be just the new way his voice sounds. Junno is probably still detached from reality in this state, probably thinks he’s dreaming. “It’ll be fine when we get out of here. I just need to figure out how,” he mumbles back to Junno.  
  
“Would you like to see the house?” is all Junno asks. “After the storm, it might be made of paper and matchsticks, but I’m sure it’s clean.”  
  
At these words, there is a heavy rumble and the boat rattles and Koki falls off his perch. It’s like the land came out of nowhere, hurtled closer at Junno’s whim. Junno pays him no mind, slipping gracefully down the ladder, fists to the railings, as he hums that half-tune. The wind is still, and the backdrop is a grainy white, torn and blurred edges and Koki clambers up after Junno, afraid he might very easily lose him again.  
  
Junno stands on the empty beach-- hands on his hips, looking up at Koki on the boat. “This isn’t home,” he states.  
  
Koki swings his legs down, and takes a deep breath before he drops. He hits sand as soft and powdery as very fine salt. “I should probably tell you,” he sighs, dusting off his legs, staring a bit wonderingly at his now dry clothes. “I should probably tell you that this isn’t exactly your brain. We’re in a machine. Sort of.”  
  
He looks guiltily up at Junno, and could swear then that an expression quite different than the bland, puzzled gaze from earlier had slipped in for the faintest moment.  
  
Koki doesn’t know what to tell him. He is on the verge of drying his mouth up with apologies, but Junno moves toward him abruptly. He freezes up as Junno does something he’s never done before; he slips both hands on either side of Koki’s face, bends his head so his forehead presses lightly against Koki’s. The contact is instantly all wrong; it’s stinging, soft, unhurried, and invasive like a stranger trailing silk over an exposed cut.  
  
“Oh, but you feel so real,” he whispers like he’s finishing a sentence from before, fingers curling in at his nape.  
  
Koki holds back his jerky reaction and remains as still as he can, staring determinedly at the threads of Junno’s t-shirt. Looking him in the eye right now seems suddenly terrifying. It’s as though it would be more intimate than if he’d done this for real. Whatever real between the two of them has since become. “Stop it,” Koki mutters, barely breathing.  
  
“Yeah, you’re really here.” Junno’s right palm slips down from his neck to his shoulder and Koki trembles. “Let’s go inside.”  
  
Koki pushes him off at last, his skin crawling with a burning unease. “Don’t…” he begins.  
  
The water is long gone, and there is only the earth. For a protracted moment, Koki stands transfixed as a little off in the distance something black and dewy, moving in spirals, slithers from the ground growing upward. The speed and the silence of it makes it all the more eerie as the black jelly quivers. Koki jumps back when it suddenly lets out a chilling, shrill scream and all but  _sprays_  out branches; wiry, needle-thin branches that curve high and claw at the canvas sky.  
  
Junno’s fingers close on his arm firmly like an order. “I said we have to go.”  
  
It’s almost like a changeover in a film, his vision flickers except it’s in every peripheral, the sand forming pillars, lines and exploding into walls around him. The air is white, even tastes white if anything and Koki shouts in alarm as the floor grows under him out of bubbles and steam, forming long stretches of pristine linoleum. It could be a house for its structure, but the walls are empty and what had for a brief second appeared to be a hallway, bursts like it exploded, but in a fountain of cream and chalk, folding in on itself, pleating into a staircase.  
  
“Your exit is upstairs,” Junno informs him, pointing.  
  
It’s ominous in and of itself without the spotless white of it. Koki shakes his arm free and moves to the stairs. He steps up just the first before he turns with a frown. “How do I know when I leave you’ll still remember me?”  
  
Junno’s brow creases. “I never forgot you...” he murmurs wonderingly.  
  
Koki goes still, squinting at Junno’s off features and the still Junno-like smile pasted across that unfamiliar face. “You don’t even remember me now, do you?”  
  
Junno rests an arm on the stair’s banister, tilting his head to observe Koki a bit indulgently. “But you’re  _here_.” A rueful laugh. “I couldn’t get rid of you if I wanted to.”  
  
Koki feels like there’s acid in his throat, laced on his breath as the thought comes to him and he says as calmly as he can, “But you  _did_ ; you did want to. And you could get rid of me; you  _nearly fucking did_!”  
  
As Koki’s voice echoes in circles up the round hall, the banister under Junno’s fingers creaks. The surrealistic upholstery and its sounds are all vivid in the silence that follows. Junno’s smile becomes strained and for the first time since he found him, Koki thinks that he isn’t as happy to find Junno as he thought he’d be.  
  
“All right,” Junno finally replies, soft enough that he sounds serious and quite like an ordinary person. “We can work all of this out when we’re out of my head or…whoever’s head this is. Shall we?”  
  
Koki doesn’t move. “You have to promise, or try…you  _have_  to remember me when we get out of here, OK?”  
  
Junno nods. “Yes, yes, of course.”  
  
Koki is nowhere near satisfied with his reply, but the fact has occurred to him that Junno might be acting this way because he’s defensive. The very place they’re in, the milk pattern of his thoughts and the colour-bleeding images in his mind; these are all uncomfortably personal. Koki turns to make the ascent with Junno following at a steady one step behind him.  
  
The stairway seems to follow a square spiral and as they go higher, it gets darker. Junno’s steps behind him are the only sound as the dark begins to swallow them. Koki is frightfully aware of the walls becoming narrower and in the silence, he can hear things shift. He hears the screams of the trees outside and a strange rattle of metal on metal, the stretch of wooden beams as though they’re in an old floating ship. As it gets all the more darker, Koki can feel other things, other  _living_  things near them, slipping up the walls on either side or peering between rafters that look grey in the half-dark.  
  
“What are they?” Koki says almost voicelessly.  
  
Junno brushes close, leaning down over the side of the steps to look. “As you get older, there are these thoughts.Little fantasies, point of views that you tuck away. I think they still like to hang around right on the fringes of new learning. I often see them just on the lines of my vision, particles that like to visit again when all the mess of adulthood goes silent.”  
  
Koki feels a shadow cross over the stairs, crawling low and he nearly jumps back. It’s weird how Junno knows this exactly, and the confidently knowing tone says he isn’t making it up either.  
  
Junno guides him further up, a palm to the middle of Koki’s back and Koki lets him, amazed at the reality of climbing so many steps without feeling in the least bit tired. He’s even more heartened as he notices the light pooling over the bare floors ahead and in the furthest distance he can see how the stairs curve into a room.  
  
“And. Here we are,” Junno murmurs as they cross the last landing and turn in the doorway.  
  
When Koki first takes a sweeping survey of the room, he is sure he’s looking at Junno’s apartment. That is, except where usually his posters, light fixtures and photographs usually hang, it’s wall to wall with windows to other rooms and they stretch from ceiling to floor, a unique frame to each one.  
  
Junno brushes ahead of him, hands in his pockets like he’s out for a stroll and that’s when Koki sees him cross eight different windows and for a moment it looks like several parallels; eight different versions of Junno crossing the same window. Mirrors. They’re mirrors and it’s so obvious that for an odd, frantic moment Koki wonders why he thought they were windows in the first place.  
  
Junno swivels and looks to the standing mirror next to Koki, and his firmly smiling expression fades. Koki follows his gaze. It’s an overwhelming strand of imbalance. Reflected, Koki can see the furniture, couches, bare cabinet, coffee table, and even the other mirrors; all with Junno in the middle of it. The whole room looks completely the same, down to its last detail except that where Koki would be standing, there is simply nothing. He steps further in, drawing close to another one and feels an instantaneous swoop of nausea at the sight of the kitchen table behind him.  
  
“Why…” he starts to say as Junno appears behind him. His eyes are fixed where Koki should be and Koki watches,  _feels_  his hands on his shoulders with the unsettling sight of Junno grasping at nothing.  
  
“Well, how about that,” Junno remarks and his fingers squeeze.  
  
Koki’s laugh is shaky and he can’t get it to stop, spilling out of him like a reflex. “O-of course, this is your head…I shouldn’t expect to see myself…”  
  
“But they’re only mirrors,” Junno informs him languidly. Koki watches their reflection, bereft of him and Junno’s smile spreading, shadows and an odd energy about him. He’s a beacon in this room, shining and grotesque. “This is simple introspection. This is the clarity our little situation needs.”  
  
Koki twists around, shaking Junno’s hands off of him. “What the hell do you mean?”  
  
As Junno steps back, he seems to grow taller and when he laughs, Koki feels the screams of the trees outside and the creak of the branches weaving through the rafters and slithering into the room where they are. The sickly warmth of the apartment begins to feel more and more like a greenhouse and Koki backs into the mirror.  
  
Junno hums musingly. “When I said I couldn’t get rid of you if I wanted to, I might’ve been wrong. After all, if you persist at something long enough, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.“  
  
Koki is already backing toward the door; his feet feel oddly heavy. Junno’s outline blurs, dark hair a halo in a dream, a fresh smile that once made Koki lose his spine, and a stare that had once gazed a depth into him that he’d frantically try to hide. Junno moves for him at an unhurried pace and everything about him that could’ve been termed beautiful is a furious horror now. Koki’s never been terrified of him before, but right now he’s the product of nightmares. Koki looks at all of these, mixed with Junno’s far too off features and it’s clarity all right.  
  
“Who are you?” His voice is so small.  
  
Junno’s mouth curves saucily, putting enthusiasm in his accompanying gestures. “ _Iriguchi, deguchi, Taguchi desu_.”  
  
“Stop that,” Koki barks at him, backing up further. “Stop. Who the fuck  _are_  you?”  
  
“You’ve made it so difficult, you know,” he goes on scornfully as if Koki hadn’t just spoke. “You and your little self-involved world of martyrdom and hedoesn’t see what everyone else sees; he doesn’t even see what you see when you look in the mirror. “  
  
“Where’s Taguchi?!” Koki shouts.  
  
Junno draws even closer, looking steadily more furious. “He doesn’t see you as you are and he never will. You like to pretend that you can hide it, and he--- well, he likes to play along, doesn’t he?”  
  
Koki’s back hits a wall and he twists around to look for the exit, but where the doorway was, there’s only another wall covered in more mirrors, all reflecting a prism of Junno advancing at a sleek pace, fists clenched. The branches are growing under the floorboards, like slippery claws scraping trails toward him and Koki nearly trips over the edge of a sofa to get to the other end of the room. Junno still follows at his own stroll, but every muscle on him is taut with fury. Koki is on his knees, pushing furniture aside as the black, wet branches start to inch like worms over the sofa. Instinctively, he kicks at it so it topples and a pealing shriek begins, a chorus, deafening and cold, each branch splitting into several and still crawling towards him.  
  
“So destructive,” this Junno says, and amidst the shrill screams, his tone is low and as drawling as usual. “You’d knife up a guy and wait ‘til he’s dead so you can bring him back to do it again.”  
  
As the fear paralyses him, Koki is aware of Junno’s words, aware that they’re stinging him, whistling a vicious madness in his gut. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he yells at him, eyes fixed on the branches now slipping too close to his shoes. “I didn’t do anything!”  
  
There’s the ear-splitting sound of glass shattering and Koki looks over at not-Junno. He’s holding a mirror in hand and another is at his feet in pieces. He looks pale with rage. “Didn’t do anything,” he echoes, practically spitting. “Why are you here?” he asks, and then louder until the volume of his voice grows, shaking the walls over the screaming. “Why are you  _here_!”  
  
Koki shuts his eyes. He can’t look at him or the branches; it’s shockingly clear that he could die, that this man is going to kill him. “Please. I’m—I’m  _sorry_.” To hear his own voice quaking out like that and on the verge of tears—god—how he hates it.  
  
Junno laughs out suddenly. “You’re a virus.” He laughs all the more and it’s terrible, ironic and all the things Junno’s laughter could never sound like. “I—haha--thought I got rid of you. I…  _really_  tried to protect him from you. “ He breathes into a whisper, heated and venomous. “Try and try and  _try_  to fix the things you  _break_.”  
  
He looks bitterly down at the shards of glass and plastic on the floor and Koki follows his stare. It’s like he can feel the choke coming on him; he’s never felt his insides squeeze this much; he feels trapped in himself, breathless and hurt. As the tips of the branches snake up his calves, Koki feels his face go hot and then cool and he raises his fingers-- touches wetness. He looks up at Junno through a blur and he can’t even conjure up hatred, just an unhappy yearning.  
  
He lifts his head and stares at Koki-- wide, glimmering eyes-- and he sighs. Abruptly the jagged branches now wrapping around Koki’s legs go still. Koki presses back against the wall, gasping with fear as Junno smiles again, this time bitterly and brokenly. “There you are. And you feel so… real…so present. Can’t wreck you like this…can’t…”  
  
Koki swallows, his mouth dry. “Taguchi, listen. About what I said—“  
  
“You think this is about the fight…” Junno cuts in wonderingly and the branches resume, thin but steely snakes reaching his chest, several sharp twigs press against his ribs and Koki starts to tremble violently. “Said things we couldn’t take back, all that-- sure, but that doesn’t matter now next to everything else you’ve ruined. Oh, you’re real definitely and I thought I’d lost.” He shakes his head and raises the mirror in his hand, a white framed one, ignoring the jerky sound of pain the branch cuts out of Koki. “But you’re not in here, which means I didn’t fail; we can probably survive this, definitely survive  _you_.”  
  
Keeping still is all he can do to keep breathing. “Why am I not in there? What did you do?” he whispers.  
  
He sets the mirror back on the wall with a brief hum. “I didn’t do anything. You used to be in these quite often, but now you’re just not. The fact you need to face, Tanaka Koki, is that  _you_  don’t belong here  _anymore_. “  
  
The sharp tip of the branch, already wrapped around his torso, does an abrupt arch backward, and the rest on the floor follow suit like snakes curving to strike venom, all sharp edges meant to impale him. Koki begins to hyperventilate, staring in horror between Junno and the serrated wooden tips gleaming over him like knives.  
  
Junno clasps his hands, an awkward single gesture so unlike the Junno he knew. “And you know what happens to things that wander in where they don’t belong, don’t you?”  
  
Koki sends one last disbelieving look at this not-Junno being, bloodthirsty and miserable and all the things Junno could never be.  
  
Junno’s wide eyes fix on Koki against the wall and he waves with his fingers; fleeting and awful gesture of goodbye. “Here’s a hint,” he laughs.  
  
As the branches thrust down at him, Koki twists, almost choking out a whimper when he feels one—thin sharp spikes nicking a graze against his throat. He grabs the mirror behind him and swipes with the frame. It shatters in his hands, glass fissuring as it collides with three different jagged tips of reaching branch. Junno shouts something but Koki can’t hear over the rising screams. Swinging what’s left of a mirror back and forth, he clears a way to where the door once was, and as he runs, he’s pushing furniture over, knocking down as many mirrors as possible until he can at least get to the other end.  
  
He collides with the wall and doesn’t think, just begins to pound his fists against it. Each blow is stinging and he can hear the branches slithering his way. It seems like an age, but it takes mere seconds with the flood behind him just touching at his ankles before he feels a pair of hands at his shoulders, yanking him backward. He makes a sound of alarm, clawing and kicking at Junno now grabbing hold of his wrists, his own hollers voiceless in his dry throat.  
  
“ _Ah, no! Not the face. I’m going on again in five!_ ”  
  
Koki goes still at these words, opening his eyes to Junno, who isn’t fighting him at all. Rather, he’s leaning his face away, holding Koki in place with no more than a bewildered, hunted look.  
  
“Taguchi?” he whispers.  
  
Big, bright eyes narrow. “You look-- what’s going on back there?”  
  
Junno lets go of his wrists and Koki sits up on his elbows and looks around. They’re atop a plated stage in a lounge of sorts. Beyond the stretch of the stage-floor lights there are low chairs and tables scattered here and there with yellow lamps that swing near the table and counter surfaces. It’s all very late sixties speak-easy club. The walls are monochromatic patterns, diamond tiles black and white over floors covered in a velvety red carpet with colourful flower-shaped lights sweeping in swirling undulations. The whole place is completely empty, but there’s music playing—a strange jazz-heavy chorus, hammy beats, but mournful notes.  
  
Junno gets up, holding out a hand to help Koki up. Koki, now staring at the stage curtain that used to be the mirrored room, ignores it. He clambers to his feet, knowing better than to let Junno touch him this time.  
  
Junno presses on nonetheless. “You’ve been crying? What did he say…?”  
  
Koki squints against the stage lights. “I was…” He breaks off, taking in Junno’s appearance suddenly. His temples are sheened with sweat, and he’s dressed in a 20’s pinstripe bright blue zoot suit complete with a sharp-looking fedora and an aqua-blue necktie. “Um…”  
  
Junno blinks down at him curiously, brow furrowed. “Sorry if it isn’t my business, but I’ve just never heard him so angry. What did you do?”  
  
Koki balks at the question; too many of his own questions clamour up at all of this, including and especially the fact that Junno knows that other Junno out there. “I didn’t…” For the hundredth time. “I didn’t do  _anything_. What are  _you_  doing?”  
  
He’s abruptly convinced that this is the Junno he’s looking for when he smiles, shamelessly pleased that Koki’s taken an interest. “I was performing. It’s a one-man rendition of  _Chicago_. No one’s ever done it and I’m due for an encore in five minutes.”  
  
Koki wipes at his face, still hot with tears and he stares out at the empty seats. “Did they all leave or…”  
  
He straightens his wide-lapelled suit jacket, dusting off the sleeves aristocratically. “They never came. Well, I’m not expecting anyone,” he amends, side-stepping Koki and moving for centre stage. “Still, show must go on, you know. Have to keep performing or else.”  
  
The music goes silent, but flows quickly into an outro of sorts and Junno looks suddenly anxious, glancing towards the curtain, and Koki realises that’s where the music is coming from. “Or else what?” he asks uneasily. Every shadow in the room looks like those branches lifting again and he’s still trembling from that.  
  
Junno clears his throat, eyes fixed on a dead light above them, a large round fixture that clearly would have been spotlight if it were on. “The record-player; it’s backstage and whenever I stop, it goes off.”  
  
Koki feels like he understands the fear in how Junno says it; the thought alone makes him frightened all over again as a nameless breeze makes the heavy red curtain billow. “You mean, the music will stop?”  
  
A shake of his head. “No. Everything. Everything goes off. It plays old records, things I don’t want to look at again, and all of this disappears.” He gestures vaguely at the dark room. “But this is safe; this isn’t anything.” It’s become darker since Koki looked there last; the stage lights are blinding.  
  
“Is this your record?” he mumbles, and he finds his attention drawn away; there’s a distant sound of water running under the low groan of the saxophone.  
  
Junno still stares fixedly at the empty spotlight. “No, this is the only one I can bear. The others hurt.”  
  
Hurt? Koki looks back at the curtains now shifting in a reverse pattern, like there’s strings attached to its edges. Violin tinges the song and the dramatic conclusion rings close as the curtains billow toward Koki. “What if you changed the record?”  
  
Junno looks at him, a wary calm in his eyes. “I don’t think I’m allowed back there.”  
  
“How do you know there’s a record player there then?” Koki steps toward him and Junno takes an uneven step away, metal-plated sole cutting a sharp click between them.  
  
“I just know,” he returns promptly, and he looks frustrated. “Really, though, why are you here? You’re never here; you’re not anywhere.”  
  
“What do you—“ The words spat at him in the mirror room all crawl back up his spine and Koki feels a sinking in his chest as he looks at this Junno gazing down at him with that vacancy. He’d completely thought that this was his Junno, and that his withdrawn disposition had entirely to do with the fight. Unfortunately this is disconnection; the basest of unknowing, and it bleeds like loneliness. Koki turns away and blinks determinedly out at the creeping darkness off-stage. He can’t do this anymore and there’s no fixing it.  
  
Junno lets out a faint chuckle behind him. “Funny. All this time dancing without an audience and now you’re here, I get all embarrassed. Even that alone is embarrassing.” He peters off into several warm, very Junno-like guffaws.  
  
Koki breathes slowly, tries his best to gain control of his voice even with what feels like a rock lodged in his larynx. “Well, I’m leaving anyway, so you just go on ahead.”  
  
He can feel Junno’s eyes on him as he crosses the stage. Perhaps a door on the other end will lead him back to where the water is. The only way out usually being in and that sort of atypical versatility motivate him forward.  
  
“Hey, um, since you’re here…”  
  
Koki whirls on him. “I’m  _not_  gonna sit here and watch you dance, if that’s what you’re about to ask!”  
  
Junno looks sheepish. “No, no. I know I’m not—I mean, you’ve made it clear before that you don’t think I’m any good, but—“  
  
“What…?” Koki cuts in, mystified.  
  
Junno folds his arms, gestures like he means to dismiss. He’s all frenetic with nerves and Koki doesn’t know why he feels sorry for him. “It’s OK. Tanaka-kun; I’m over it… like, I was planning to ask you what your deal was, but, you know, we never get the chance to talk.”  
  
Koki pauses. “Wait, you’re…” He isn’t even sure how to phrase it despite it being all cut and dry in his head. One Junno being his, one back in that mirror room bent on some kind of vendetta, and one that might just, really, be the one he knows but simply doesn’t know him. “You and I…” What a mess. “We…went out for drinks earlier?”  
  
He grimaces. “Yeah, sorry, I went and drank too much again and we were having such a good time too…weren’t we?”  
  
The next breath Koki lets out is embarrassingly like a sob. “Oh my god, it’s you. Well, it’s not you, but you’re still you…without…”  
  
He laughs. “God, you’re so weird,” he says and he crosses the space between them, raising a tentative hand to Koki’s shoulder. He pats, wide palm covering his shoulder before he gives him a bit of a friendly shake.  
  
Koki buries his face quickly in his palms and rubs as if to clear the last hour away. He’s still shaken, but he doesn’t feel as lost. Junno is very near and this touch doesn’t freeze him, rather it is wholehearted warmth and a bit of an old tugging feeling, heated like a hole of missing someone. Koki won’t look at him and has to forcibly prevent himself from just grabbing Junno and holding on because after the terror in the mirror room, he can’t think of anyone he’d have wanted to see more.  
  
“Ah, sorry,” Junno begins doubtfully, withdrawing his hand. “I didn’t mean—“  
  
Koki raises his head and forces a smile, only barely managing to look him in the eye. “I don’t hate your dancing. I never said that; you’ve got to stop assuming things about me.”  
  
Junno gives a rueful half-shrug. “I’ll keep that in mind. Well, I wasn’t even going to ask you to watch me. I was actually wondering whether you’d… you know, change the record for me.”  
  
Koki stares at him. “Me? Change the record?”  
  
Junno nods. “I don’t think I can go back there. Besides, whatever you know I’d know it too.”  
  
Koki turns and faces the curtains now scraping a wave over the stage surface. The lights are dimming further the longer Junno does nothing. “I don’t know if you know what I know,” he mutters, glancing at him a little furtively.  
  
Junno ducks his head. “Well, if you don’t mind just peeking back there…you could tell me record titles. I honestly don’t mind looking at unfamiliar things if  _you_  pick them.”  
  
That almost physically hurts Koki. He grits his teeth and stares pointedly at the stage floor under the wafting curtain. “OK.”  
  
He’s scared for sure. If there is a chance he could walk past those curtains straight back into the mirror room with a livid, homicidal Junno in there, he’s not sure why he’s compliant enough to be walking that way again. Maybe it’s the flickering fear under Junno’s smile that makes Koki’s own nerves seem suddenly unimportant. He crosses downstage and feels Junno follow as he touches at the edge of the curtain. He sucks in a breath when he pulls at the long, heavy velvet; drags at handfuls of fabric until he can see the end.  
  
“Careful,” Junno whispers behind him.  
  
Koki feels the curtain slip over his back as it closes over stage right. He glances around and it’s just another room, all corners of it black with shadow, except for the center where a single lamp stands on a tall rectangular glass table on thin metal legs. The lamp illuminates what can only be a silver and black record player with the needle scrawling into the grooves of an already spinning vinyl. That isn’t what has Koki squinting to make sure he was seeing right. Instead it’s the long horn-shaped attachment-- which would seemingly be the thing the music would be playing out of-- streams out a ghost of an image, and around the fringes of ghostly lights the transparency flows into the real; the sensations of the room, the stage, the curtain, the music.  
  
“What do you see?” says Junno on the other side of the curtain.  
  
“The record player,” Koki replies tentatively. “It’s here, but it’s playing… it’s playing the room?”  
  
Junno makes a humming sound and he hears the click of his tap-dance shoes approaching. Koki takes a step closer to the lamp as the shadows seem his main phobia at the moment and he grabs it by its base, raising it to shine light on the corners of the room he can’t see.  
  
Just as Junno steps around the curtain, looking around apprehensively, Koki lets out a faint gasp. It’s all record covers, taped and tacked into the walls, floors and on the furniture, arranged in no particular order but that they’re all visible, some overlapped and piled.  
  
“Now I  _know_  I’m not supposed to be in here. Pick a record quick, you,” Junno utters anxiously at him.  
  
Koki grimaces. “Right, right.” He looks for the cord on the lamp but there’s none attached so Koki picks it up and holds it high as he walks toward a bookshelf with records pouring out of it. He has no idea what to pick. The titles and images on the record sleeves are strange like a manic collage of photos arranged with tweezers; too small to make out with cacophonic titles like “Over the stair banister: Divorce” and “The Fence: Ryunosuke’s shoes.” Koki draws back and looks at the record currently turning and realises that it’s bare.  
  
It’s completely insane, but as he moves back for the piles of records, pawing through titles like “In Kyoto: Her Brown Eyes,” and “Episode 34 audio” Koki is convinced that these are memories. He kneels on the floor, lamp at his elbow as he wordlessly begins to pull each record from its pile, eyes darting over titles in a panicked calm. He doesn’t dare think it, feeling as though it might make everything crumble and he’d have to start again. Right now, it’s about just checking; only trying to see. Hope and mania all at once.  
  
Remembering anything of what Manabe-sensei had said about memory and how it works seems like some dream from long ago, but he relives words; their sounds and intonations as he pushes record after record aside.  
  
 _Our aim is reconsolidation_ ” He’d said.“ _In which we both find, and rewire the cancelled memory chain back to its initial processing state—the learning space_ …”  
  
If the records are memories, then their position in the room might indicate a chain connection and the record player-- spilling an image into the air so bright and detailed it was like reality-- would be the learning space. Right? Koki doesn’t dare ask Junno and he sifts through the records, looking for something that’d sound in any way connected to him. If he has to, he’ll tear down the whole mountain of records if it means reconstructing their time together.  
  
“Are you looking for something specific?” Junno asks him and Koki doesn’t turn around even when he hears his footsteps come closer. “Because we can’t stay here long; can’t be fiddling with anything that might break. He’ll be so upset…”  
  
Koki gets up, clutching the lamp as he approaches a chest of drawers overflowing with records. He spots the pattern when he’s flipping through one line of it stuffed in the bottom drawer. “Eight Valentine’s” one says and then “Okasan’s Car: Audition.” There’s no order of course. Of course. Memories wouldn’t be linear, would always be at a hand’s grasp distance; pleated thoughts and cycles of perspectives each one significant and overlapped with another.  
  
The chest of drawers is very clearly—if Koki knows Junno at all—the events connected to his public face. Like Junno’s social self, but beyond that with several subtitles like “They’re Watching,” and worse yet, “Bathroom Mirror”.  
  
The most terrible thing about his hope right then is its prickly undercurrent that  _his_  record might not be here; that maybe it no longer even exists.  
  
Koki doesn’t want to think on that. He’s had his fill of all this. Under several records is one titled simply ‘Restricted’. It has a plain white sleeve with what seems to be fingerprints all over it, smudged dusty and grey.  
  
“What do you think?” Koki mumbles, holding it up for Junno to see and Junno nods, an uncertain gait as he hesitates to come any closer. Koki removes the sleeve and examines the record. It just looks like a regular record; it has a faint blue sheen and the grooves of it are tightly-knit in places with various large spaces between others. Koki runs his thumb over one thoughtfully and is startled to realise that the lines of the record are soft, rubbery like an eraser. He doesn’t know what possesses him to do it until after he does it, but he presses his thumb deeper until his thumbnail digs into the spongy soft material.  
  
“Hey…” Junno murmurs. He sounds far away and frightened.  
  
Koki makes his own groove, thumbnail scraping across the gleaming surface, one long shaving leading a circle right where there was nothing. It hurts a bit and out of the corner of his eye he sees Junno slump and let out a sad moan.  
  
“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t do that.”  
  
Koki glances over at him and Junno has backed against the curtain, staring in deep agony at the record in Koki’s hand.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Koki says to him. “I’m sorry but there has to be some way I can…”  
  
When Koki pulls the needle off the record player, it halts with a jarring scrape and Junno takes a loud, uneasy breath. Koki doesn’t waste any time replacing it with the new one. It starts to spin on contact. He’s never used an actual record player before, but he’s sure it can’t be much different than when he’d play a turntable record and he tests it by placing it gingerly near the middle of its deep grooves  
  
At first it’s in short bursts, the lights in the room flickering. The colour of everything backstage seems to amplify before a vision blares right through Koki’s pupils. He can’t make out what he’s seeing, but what scares him most is his own immediate immateriality. He feels the need to step back but there isn’t even the sensation of him doing that; he’s been left with only sight and sound.  
  
It blares toward him in whispers, icy thousands coiling up his middle and Koki feels only Junno’s thoughts slip close to his like a hand curling over his palm, warm, intimate, and demanding.  
  
“Couldn’t you just stay with me?”  
  
“Yeah,” Koki says, thinks, or both possibly as he cleaves to Junno’s thoughts. “I wasn’t actually going anywhere.”


	3. Three

They’re in a rehearsal room and Koki sees Junno glance at his own reflection—all the gangly of thirteen or fourteen years of age-- in the mirrors as he walks toward a young, dark-eyed little girl dressed in a tracksuit and a pair of little trainers. The word—name-- attached to her face sits over her impression like clinging Velcro.  
  
“ _Koki-kun_!” Junno exclaims, every type of over-the-top, excitedly.  
  
For a moment it’s in just the pierce of her stare where Koki realises that he’s really, actually looking at  _himself_  at only fourteen, got up like a poor kid and smiling like a million dollars. Little him looks up and regards Junno uneasily, already taken aback by his height at the same time trying to puff up and look bigger. Small fourteen year old Koki, even for his height, manages to look at the already 5”6” Junno like he’s an underling. The way of the natural brat.  
  
Small Koki opens his mouth to say something imperious and there’s no sound; just his mouth forming a visibly slurring mess of words, carrying and drawling. With such an affected, rough way of speaking that it’s practically a speech impediment, he’s ready to be friends like the whole world’s just that easy.  
  
Junno is fascinated. A lot of moving to different cities; getting to play the mysterious new kid in school, popular until he speaks, and it isn’t getting old, but there has never been anything like this. No one like this boy.  
  
And this boy; this bit of a thing in a visibly 90’s hand-me-down tracksuit—too big for him, sleeves rolled up above his elbows—and bangs in a tiny blond ponytail on top of his head is practically caterwauling at fourteen-year old Junno in a large, crowded gymnasium. This child of fire and ice doesn’t seem conscious of his own cherubic mouth and big-eyed-long-lashes straight out of a book as he snaps at this taller boy he barely knows.  _…and don’t you expect me to stand around all day and tell you what to do! I ain’t about that and you’re going to learn how to do it all without help, just like I did. I’ll help you but I won’t help you. You get that? You should be honoured!_  
  
 _Oh, man… how cool!_  Junno’s thinking.  
  
Koki doesn’t even remember this moment.  
  
The colours of the image cling and swirl like milk. Koki hears laughter and Junno right near him says, “You were the baddest, coolest boy I’d ever been allowed to talk to.”  
  
Koki, who would normally take offence, feels his own immaterial presence grab hold of Junno’s thoughts, grab hold tight enough that it’s like pressing against a warm wall. Junno’s thoughts near his feels like the cooling heat of an iron surface. “I don’t remember when we first met. Nothing like that,” he hears himself say.  
  
“I remember,” Junno answers simply like it had been true all along when Koki knows it couldn’t be. “You went away after that. Stopped coming to dance practice and everyone told me you were doing some kind of drama and that time away from you got me thinking that I’d worked you out. I wanted to be as cool as you were. I thought I’d got there the year we met again; thought I’d found a self that could do without you. I was trying to make you less important and it hurt me how you moved past me and kept being something I wanted to be a part of.”  
  
Koki doesn’t understand that, but he remembers coming back to work with them and the cute, smiling noodle of a kid he’d met before had turned into an aloof, smiling noodle of a jerk.  
  
“…wanted to be a part of,” Junno repeats wonderingly and he’s far away now like he’d wandered off a bit, looking at something different and Koki, feeling cold, shifts after him.  
  
That’s when he sees something fade in and out, like a candle dying out right as he lights it. It’s a completely silent image, riddled with blotches and damaged in spots. Koki sees the dark, the arid blue of his own aquarium bright and the flutter of fliers over his air conditioner, and what he feels. He feels the open shape of a mouth on his and all the words that mouth says to him: burning, passionate and indifferent. He’s thinking with elation  _that’s what he feels like_. The tentative swagger in the thought isn’t Koki’s and he hears Junno make a wondering low, uncertain sound.  
  
Koki instantly knows what this is and takes a horrified step back—a blank white ‘no’ on his lips as he forms a door and shuts it firmly.  
  
“What was that?” Junno exclaims.  
  
“Dunno,” Koki replies. He wonders briefly what it means to be able to tell a lie in someone else’s head.  
  
A new room shakes; there’s a stain on the edges of the image like a jet black pen had exploded on just the fringes of their page. The silence ends when Koki hears a heart monitor somewhere far off and smells hospital smells. Bleach, antibiotics and rice pudding.  
  
They’re looking at a still small Koki-- now a bit taller, but still tiny in a school uniform-- seated silently, pencil scratching on a workbook. He’s distant in just a single stretch of a white hospital bed and the sheen on the veneer of a nearby metal contraption holding up a long leg in a cast gleams at him. Koki feels pain; not paralysing but the throbbing kind you get used to where it sits right on your nerves like fever and Koki is aware of the dizzy powder taste of medicine in his mouth as his fingers—Junno’s—lift a newly peeled orange slice to his mouth.  
  
There’s the break and burst of orange juices on his tongue and little Koki doesn’t speak. He sits there, pencilling in the wrong answers on his workbook and glancing up with affected annoyance each time Junno finishes a fruit and declares it perfect.  
  
This, Koki remembers. Junno’s injury. He remembers not knowing what to say, remembers looking at Junno’s knee all bruised and delicate; and each time he looked at it, it made him picture Junno doing back flips down a hallway, becoming a different creature in just the arch of his back, and lastly, the elated, breathless look of his finish, regaining balance and smiling like he’d just invented flexibility.  
  
Koki had once worked with a rabbit whose heel had fractured and it really wasn’t anywhere near the same. So he sat there, staring at his workbook and not reading a word, pencil scribbles soon littering the spaces he would later have to go through and erase. And here was Taguchi; god-awful, unstoppable Taguchi not even able to go to school to fill out his own stupid workbooks and do the stupid choreography at work.  
  
This hospital room had presented Koki with the glaring prospect of Koki’s KAT-TUN without Taguchi. And it made him angry because he still didn’t even  _like_  being in KAT-TUN and the prospect of no Taguchi just made the downhill slope of his future look so much worse. Junno bites an orange and feels a chilly thrill when little Koki glares at him heatedly all of a sudden.  
  
“You know, you sat there for the whole evening until the last train?” Junno’s thoughts press him. “Not a single word except the ‘Don’t expect me to show up here everyday!’ when you were leaving.”  
  
“I had no idea what to say!” he protests at the general cool of Junno’s amusement. “I was scared and your leg looked really bad. I thought you might not dance again.”  
  
“Knew it,” says Junno. “This was something I used to think about all the time. You, there to take care of me, and you being there were just like how the orange tasted after being medicated. Next to the nauseous false comforts of ‘Hope you get better!’ or ‘Be strong’. Just  _you_  there, sitting for hours and glaring at me like you were actually just impatient with me, with my pain. Waiting while I rehabilitated with a stare that was like you were ordering me to get better. Telling me to simply get up and be who I was.”  
  
Koki watches the smaller him scratch out the words ‘IdiotIdiotIdiotIdiot!’ in his margin and he feels like smiling. “Who you were. Yeah, that’s what I wanted.”  
  
Junno sighs a little wistfully.  
  
“It’s really all I ever wanted,” says Koki, hating every second of his own honesty.  
  
He hears a sob just then. It comes out raw and choked back like it was never supposed to, and for a wild moment, Koki feels around for Junno in the white, but he’s there beside him, silent, and watching.  
  
“Oh.  _Oh…_ ,” murmurs Junno, in the middle of an epiphany, as the sobbing breaks and becomes a steady cry. Hurt the way a child’s can be.  
  
Koki watches as the hospital room collapses in on itself and turns into a grass lawn in the middle of a sweltering seaside town. It’s a summer day with sea breezes and the wind chimes ring above him. They’re on a back porch and Koki looks toward the sobbing noise. He sees a small Junno crouched on the back porch steps, fists over his eyes as he cries openly with not a single person around. All, but the two of them.  
  
In alarm, Koki looks up at Junno. He looks quite normal now, standing beside Koki. The suit is gone and he just is; non-descript t-shirt and jeans. “Why are we seeing it like this? That’s you there, so why--”  
  
“Because I never remember this moment the way it was,” Junno says, looking at his younger self the way a parent would. “It’s different every time, but it always feels the same.”  
  
Koki watches as little Junno cups his hands over his face; he curls up, already lanky legs pulled up to his chest as he bends himself close to his knees. Koki has never had to forcibly prevent himself from drawing near to someone. Everything in him just wants to sit near this small boy and shield him from whatever could make him cry like that. “What happened?”  
  
Junno bites just the corner of his lip. An old habit. “Look up,” he murmurs, eyes trained on his smaller self.  
  
Hesitantly, Koki lifts his eyes to the sky. Bare and naked blue with the sun as blistering in his vision as it would be any hot day, and there, alone in the blue, a large green balloon floats higher and higher carried off in the breeze.  
  
“Is that yours?” Koki whispers, for some reason feeling like his voice might intrude on the moment.  
  
“We went to a festival that day; it was the first time my whole family went somewhere together after the divorce. We had to come back early because Mom had work. When we came back, my sister tied it around my wrist before she and Ryu went home with Dad,” Junno murmurs. “She didn’t tie it tight enough, I guess. She only did it because I asked her to. When they left, I sat here and it slipped off. I didn’t grab the string in time and then…”  
  
He’d known Junno for years and years and Junno had told him piles and piles of stories about him and his siblings, but he’d never told him this one. Koki feels an incomprehensible sense of guilt at the idea that maybe Junno would have never wanted him to see this.  
  
As they watch little Junno sit up and begin to wipe his eyes, a flurry of images abruptly race across the back porch, sweeping in like a jukebox album. Rooms they’ve seen before, and many unfamiliar places. Koki sees himself littered in several, getting older and older and it’s a strange feeling as ever looking at the self he was only two years ago.  
  
The silence of the pictures gives Koki pause as he looks at himself blinking up at Junno for a brief second in their old dressing room. His eyes are red-rimmed and he looks gaunt and tired, wool hat pulled down over his ears. To Koki this could have been any moment, but Junno’s thoughts crowd in on the word ‘breakup’. Koki watches the way he seems to catch Junno watching him and quickly shifts his chair around, looking carefully distracted and away.  
  
Koki remembers those days, acting like one of his bandmates—now clearly Junno—hadn’t said, “Are you all right?”  
  
The image shivers and flickers for seconds to the back porch again and Koki sees the connection. Junno overlapping his one moment of utter despair with the look on Koki’s face that day. It hurts like nothing else has so far and he can practically hear the way the Junno with him now is being tactfully silent.  
  
It isn’t fair, though, because Koki hadn’t known back then that Junno would ever actually have understood what he felt.  
  
The stage is beginning to form around them and Junno, still standing where he’d been before, watches Koki for a still second before he says, “Those silent ones were strange. Like they were forced in with the others, but I feel like they belonged. Why?”  
  
Koki can’t exactly look at him. He’s thinking a little about how he’d managed to create a door; prevent Junno from seeing something. “Probably because those were the ones you forgot; you forgot a lot of things.”  
  
Junno looks uncomfortable suddenly, frowning and looking over at the records still discarded. “What about this one? Do you think I’ll remember what’s on here?” Junno walks toward Koki, the room now much more clear, and he picks up a record titled ‘K’ right where Koki’s sure he had just been looking before.  
  
“Where’d you get that?” Koki exclaims, taking it from him.  
  
Junno shrugs. “It’s been right there all along.” He looks down at the piles of sleeves scattered at his feet. “I was wondering why you wouldn’t pick up the one about you. I know  _you_.”  
  
He could swear it wasn’t there when he was looking. Completely nonplussed, Koki pulls off the sleeve. It looks like it’s been battered pretty badly; the edges are bent and there’s scratches all over the back. “So that’s how you tried to do it,” he murmurs.  
  
He’s trying to sound a breezy because there’s been a horrible thought growing in him since he’d switched the record. The things he’s seeing and what they mean next to everything else just seem to carry so much more weight. He’s always known in the back of his mind that Junno was more than just the person he presents publicly, but it guts him a little to think that he doesn’t consider that enough. Much like what Manabe-sensei had said, perhaps it  _is_  actually just him that’d have to suffer if Junno ever left him for good.  
  
Just his luck.  
  
“Taguchi, should I even play this record?” he asks, hearing his own brittle tones.  
  
Junno, now leaning over the record player curiously, glances up sharply. “What, why not?”  
  
Koki holds it up. “What if whatever you see here makes it worse?”  
  
Junno stares at him in disbelief suddenly. Koki doesn’t know what he’s hoping for, but he knows whatever Junno decides, that will be it. “Koki, why are you talking like  _knowing you_  is some kind of viral condition?”  
  
Koki freezes, caught on that thought for a second. Junno raises his hands in a quick placating gesture as he takes the record from Koki’s hands and sets it under the needle. Koki is struck speechless and Junno looks up as the record starts to play.  
  


 

 

 

 

*

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The images are so much clearer on this record and they feel warmer, sweeter. They watch all the moments Koki remembers clearly. The days when they just abruptly fell together and from Junno’s end it seems abrupt and miraculous. Koki is everywhere and in everything. They’re slowly and unexpectedly getting along really well.  
  
Koki sees his own laughter and how it changes a room, watches in some agony as Junno steadily infuses everything he does with  _goodness_. He realises only then what’s been getting at him this whole time. Watching these memories, sitting in a mind that isn’t his own, it feels like  _he’s_  the one re-learning everything in a different lens and Junno watches fondly like someone watching an endless stream of home movies.  
  
“Do you… remember now?” Koki hears himself ask at some point as the image in front of them floods into something silly. The two of them sitting alone in the front seat of a car, listening to music and Koki’s showing Junno gang signals he’d learned off TV. Junno is the same, excitable even; even laughing at some of the things his memory self says.  
  
“I didn’t know I forgot anything,” Junno replies firmly.“I may have forgotten how much fun I’ve had with you, though,” he adds not long after and Koki feels more heartened than he expected.  
  
Koki supposes that works too.  
  
Of course it tries to sneak in again, that one image, hot as the room was, and this time it’s etched in deeper detail. Junno seems drawn to it and Koki keeps a tight hold of him. Anything, but that, he thinks.  
  
The next comes over them sharply detached next to their better days. Before, each of Junno’s thoughts in the memory would bloom right over Koki’s own thinking, but now it’s like watching a scene from a Junno camera view, only emotions splash as strong as if they’re Koki’s. Koki watches memory Junno watch memory Koki with a sorry feeling of dwindling hope. Koki is talking to him normally on the other end of a couch. He has his legs thrown over Junno’s as he gesticulates broadly about something on the television and Junno’s gaze wanders over Koki’s expression of distracted interest turned towards the TV; Junno seems to be simply looking and he’s on the verge of saying something he doesn’t entirely want to say. Then, after a long silence, he finally looks away.  
  
“What was that about?” Koki murmurs.  
  
Junno doesn’t reply.  
  
The fight comes forward in the wake of the last and Koki had braced himself for it, had relived it for weeks now.  
  
Memory Junno still keeps that loaded look, watching Koki act his usual self and there’s a bitter bile taste to it. Koki finds it so overwhelming, he feels himself draw back, cringe as he sees those trees they’d walked past that day. The burn of autumn is all around them and Junno starts to feel a little better; the words in his head are blanked out as each thought races across. Koki watches himself laugh and the way he glances up quickly; one of those stolen glances he’d sneak and it’s almost mortifying now that he knows Junno saw it, noting it like he seemed to note everything else Koki does. It has a newer feeling to it and possibilities crawl up Junno’s spine to the point where Koki feels uncomfortable by the time Junno, warm again, thinks of confirmation, finally doing something he’d wanted to for the longest time.  
  
Then he asks that question; that harmless question.  
  
 _“So when are we finally going for that trip?_  
  
It only seems to come together as Koki watches himself make that joking grimace in response. He and Junno are in the dark somewhere and Koki has to reach out with whatever he is to regain Junno’s attention. “You… that’s not what you were planning to ask, was it?”  
  
Junno sounds hesitant. “Well… I know what I was going to ask, but the context seems a little weird. I have no idea why I’d wanna say something like that or why I’m too scared to.”  
  
Koki watches himself-- the short fuse—start to bristle the more Junno talks. He can’t watch. “What was it? You can ask me now because all the rest of this is not important. I didn’t mean anything I said then.”  
  
He hears Junno sigh. “I was going to ask if you liked me,” he finally admits.  
  
“That’s…” It’s all sorts of anticlimactic. Well, if Junno  _had_  asked him that right then, it would have brought him up short for sure, but the fear and strange edge of Junno’s mindset as the question sits just isn’t right. He didn’t even know Junno could get like this.  
  
“What would you have answered?” Junno prompts quickly, nervously.  
  
They watch quietly as Koki effectively ends everything. All the things Junno had said winding down to that second. Junno had talked about seasons changing, had easily implied that whatever they had going on wasn’t going to last.  
  
Koki wishes none of this had happened, but he can’t change it and this fact makes him admit, “Yes. I would’ve told you ‘yes’ in the end.” It just seems easier where Junno can’t see him or any expressions he might have made; where they’re close to each other like this.  
  
Junno lets out a soft rueful laugh. “You would’ve said yes,” he echoes, quiet and relieved and so much of the Junno he was before that day when they fought. “Why did I think you wouldn’t…?”  
  
“I don’t really know, but I’m happy you’re back. I’ll say it as many times as I have to if it means you don’t go away like that again,” Koki informs him firmly. Whatever it means when he says he likes him. Koki knows it could be a whole lot more, but there’s so much of a mess under their surface, he’s not sure he could handle the weight if he ever let himself want more.  
  
The cloud of lingering images is ahead of them and Koki doesn’t want to see anymore, doesn’t see the point when all of what has been private for Junno he’s already intruded on.  
  
The stage floor grows warm under his back and the room is the same as they’d left it, except that the red velvet curtains are pulled back. Junno is sitting beside him, and he has that old look again, tired though it is. He remembers Koki entirely. It’s a little off-putting; how wrecked he feels just seeing Junno the same as he was, so Koki simply doesn’t look at him anymore. “I think it’ll be OK now,” Koki mutters, eyes to the floor as he sits up. “So long as you’re the way you used to be—“  
  
“No,” Junno replies delicately. “No, I don’t think we’ll be OK.”  
  
Koki looks at him again, searching suddenly for any sign that he isn’t speaking to the right one, but Junno’s eyes are the same, wide and limitless, but all the things missing before in his stare are there, both stark and breath-taking.  
  
“Why not?”  
  
Because we’re not finished,” Junno says matter-of-factly. “There’s one more, isn’t there, Koki?”  
  
Koki sees it in the corner of his eye; he knows what it is. The panic begins to climb. “But you remember. You remember everything and we can go; let’s just—“  
  
He isn’t looking at him so he can’t see Junno’s expression, but Junno says it like anyone giving an order. “We have to go back there because I think I know what it is.”  
  
Koki is on his knees and his fists are pressed to his thighs. “You don’t understand,” he whispers. “I can’t.”  
  
Junno shrugs. “Try anyway,” he says loftily and then, perfectly natural, he holds out his hand, palm angled down toward Koki. It’s a universal gesture, ‘grab hold’ in every tenured line of Junno’s offered hand and it’s really silly because Koki has grabbed that hand often enough when circumstance called for it, but this is different and they’re alone in a different world.  
  
He no longer has control of it as the curtains swoop down like a wave and Koki only grabs on-- quickly interlacing their fingers before he can think of pulling away-- just as a new image clatters in place around them of a dark, warm room with an open window, pouring in a blur of city light. From the looks of it, Junno is staring at a dark ceiling, warm, out of breath as the room spins.  
  
Exposed, his every emotion in tune with Junno’s, Koki feels whatever is material about himself curl up as their vision blurs. Junno’s sight. The ceiling, Junno’s voice, and Koki’s breath on Junno’s arm as he hiccoughs soft drunken laughter. It’s sickeningly familiar; a scene Koki hasn’t looked at in forever; for the sake of whatever could keep him sane and  _not_  looking at Junno that way. Simply cancelled like everything that was brimming in his gut that night.  
  
“I can’t watch,” Koki groans.  
  
“You avoided this the whole time, didn’t you?” Junno says, and he sounds so stricken. “Because you told me you didn’t remember, right? You told me you were too drunk…”  
  
It’s worse than a crime, though. Koki wishes he could shut his eyes, but the image transcends every sense he has in this state. He’s practically breathing the truth.  
  
Of course he remembers. Of course.  
  
“This was a month ago…” Junno says and Koki can’t tear his eyes away.  
  
It’s all flooded in Koki’s very marrow: the events bleeding to these seconds they’re watching right now. In hindsight, Koki believes it was like this moment had been hurtling at them all along. Like on-coming traffic, and suddenly the both of them were racing full speed without thinking.  
  
After nights and nights of Junno staying because Koki got him too tipsy to drive; how Koki had laughed himself sick at Junno’s awful impressions of Koki’s friends, and Junno answering Saku-chan’s barks with giddy fake-yips of his own. Koki had claimed it was Junno’s fault that his neighbours hated him and Junno apologised to the right and left walls of his apartment, thinking himself so funny, but Koki’s face was sore from smiling and they’d only agreed to go to bed because Koki had a ‘thing’ tomorrow.  
  
They’d fallen into bedclothes when Junno had tossed himself backward, taking up the whole mattress. Koki, heady with alcohol, had scrapped with him, the both of them sharing a private, breathing/laughing and drunk—too drunk—moment. Koki remembers how he’d thought ‘No one will see this; it’s OK; we’re drunk; we’re just friends and maybe I can pretend I don’t remember this. Whatever this is’.  
  
In Junno’s eyes, Koki is a complicated warm weight on his hips and for blind seconds he couldn’t be more happy or any more horrified.  
  
Koki sees how Junno has his eyes shut, collapsing back on his own pillow. Then Koki sees himself, a messy haired shadow kneeling over him with a smile that’s all threatening and too much promise. He feels the instant slam of apprehension Junno feels and the tight, perfect feeling of owning the world in that second just as he forgets himself and closes his hands on Koki’s hips.  
  
Koki expects himself to react, to recoil in some way. He remembers feeling it in himself that second. Just that one shudder at Junno’s fingers squeezing. All of him had burst with heat, and then the shift of muscle under his hips had jolted a revelation that they’d just crossed some preliminary line. There were so  _many_  little comments that had hopped to the front of his mind to say; to fix this one miniscule moment before it wrecked anything else, but he didn’t say them.  
  
There’s no change in his own dizzy smile, though. Instead, just his hands reach down to grab Junno’s. Koki interlaces their fingers and Junno is smiling at how Koki’s mouth forms a frown of wonder at the way they fit perfectly. Their thoughts are so much the same, tuned to a scary discovery. Then slowly; so very slowly, Koki raises Junno’s hands away from him at an unbalanced angle.  
  
Junno has his eyes half-shut and observes him through the blurred brush of his eyelashes and Koki finds himself just as awestruck at Junno’s version of him. He’s smiling beatifically, looking a little mystified and nervous. Koki has never seen himself like this and he stares in speechless awe at this same painted and cut image.  
  
Koki remembers feeling caught in a wrong reality, one where Junno’s body reacts to him, where it’s not just…  
  
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Koki whispers and Junno’s smile fades. He doesn’t know he’d been looking at Koki any special way. It all felt the same except that Koki feels fevered in his lap.  
  
Junno is more aware of the sleek muscle of Koki’s legs and the question sits even heavier between them when Junno murmurs a wary, “I don’t know.” And he smiles again, heat flooding his face. Koki hadn’t seen that, had only seen a steady stare in the dark, and Junno letting Koki push his hands above his head; a surrender happening in slow motion as neither of them looks away.  
  
What happens next is like a movie Koki memorised with a lead character he doesn’t entirely like. This is the scene where Koki bends down and kisses Junno. This is when everything falls apart.  
  
Sometimes people say things, do things to Junno simply because none of it appears to faze him whether it’s a joke, one of his commiserating remarks, or even simply his abrupt laughter. Still, Junno can’t  _exactly_  be accused of being cold. It’s just something in his static personality; his permanent warmth and smiles that had always come across as flighty, careless and untouchable. Koki learned what to do to make Junno seem more real and over the years, he’d both hated and loved being one of the few people capable of making Junno’s eyes crinkle in embarrassment and of paralysing Junno with laughter enough that everything ice about him would just vanish and for bare seconds he’d  _be_  real.  
  
If ever Koki were to claim that had anything to do with the reason he did it, he would definitely be lying.  
  
He used to tell himself that he has  _no idea_  why he did it. He used to mull it over and automatically cover every explanation with the careful lie that it was just stupid and he didn’t  _mean_  for it to go that far.  
  
It’s a detailed lie, in the end, because Koki knows there are too many layers to this. Koki  _does_  know why he did it and admitting it is like being flayed, left raw to any tearing wind. He’d gone and done it easily because he wanted to. It wasn’t even a serious kiss, virtually chaste, his lips glancing lightly a bit too high; he’d thought it would be safe if he did it then and detached from his future self who would have to deal with however Junno reacted.  
  
And then Junno kisses him back and that’s a whole different thing. It seems so simple in Junno’s mind; a whole bunch of surprise and a single thought strain of  _Finally_. Koki is warm, smells sweet, and  _feels_  fantastic. Junno just wants more, just doesn’t want to think for a few moments and licks the liquor taste right off Koki’s lips. He’s opening his mouth for Koki, almost too scared to move his hands so he just clutches Koki’s fingers tighter and Koki’s whole frame makes a welcoming arch over him as he feels the shape of Junno growing hard under him.  
  
It’s basic, unfamiliar and simple. Koki’s erection is pressed against him and they’re moving in an uncertain, but heated simulation of sex. Koki is gasping against his lips, murmuring half-words of encouragement while Junno doesn’t know what he’s doing but he doesn’t care and can’t possibly get enough.  
  
And it isn’t. It isn’t anywhere near enough because it’s quick, hot, and messy. Junno’s shorts ride up and Koki’s hips make greedy, perfect circles. Junno has his teeth clenched because he’s genuinely trying not to push his luck with Koki working himself into a trembling mess on top of him as he rocks his hips faster. He shocks Junno, blanketing him with erotic shivers, with how his first moan sounds, dragged out of him, open-mouthed and mewling. So startling, it’s hotter than anything Junno’s heard. And Junno is euphoric; drunk as Koki is, he’s thinking he could do this all night,  _loves_  Koki like this because for once, he has no guard and what he wants from Junno is a focused, single-minded thing. Junno wants to give him more, but he can’t and he doesn’t even know why.  
  
It isn’t anywhere near enough and then it’s over. Junno comes all over himself and Koki, rigid and sweaty, clutches him as he shudders and he can feel the throb and mess on his thigh and the slick slide of Koki’s hot mouth panting right over his jaw. Their kisses are done and they aren’t looking at each other; the both of them are just one form on the bed in a mess of sheets, sticky and wondering what the hell they just did.  
  
Watching the moment now, Koki recalls the feeling of Junno slowly disentangling their fingers and resting both palms on Koki’s naked back. He didn’t move as they both lay there, breathing residual breaths and Koki had no idea what to say.  
  
Junno, though, is caught in something left behind. They’re clutching each other because if they let go, it stops being simple. They have to look each other in the eye or worse,  _talk_  about it.  
  
“Koki…” Junno says then; he sounds rough and lazy, but uneasy.  
  
In his view, Junno can’t see Koki’s face when he rolls off and slurs at him, “Don’t. Let’s just…sleep. ‘M too drunk to work out what that was just now.”  
  
And Junno laughs and it seems like it’ll be all right because they’re  _both_  a mess, and confused and that had been almost  _amazing_  and he can’t wait until they do it again; better, less hurried and Junno can explore…  
  
He drops off as Koki’s breathing deepens.  
  
“Oh my god,” the Junno beside Koki murmurs breathlessly.  
  
“I know,” Koki answers with some resignation. “I know.”  
  
The morning seeps in the room they’re watching as Koki tries very hard not to think too much. The clock strikes 8:00 a.m. and the alarm on Junno’s side goes off. Shifting fitfully, he reaches out, eyes still shut and hits the snooze button. He groans in pain and stretches a bit, sheets sticking to him. Beside him, Koki sleeps on in utter oblivion to Junno’s quick and suddenly wide-awake, horrified realisation that he’s still a mess from last night.  
  
He swings his legs off the bed and glances back at Koki. Koki sees himself, completely knocked out, sheets curled around him in a ball and his hair a tousled disaster on top of his head. And Junno goes and makes this weird, unguarded soppy grin and Koki hadn’t seen that.  
  
Next thing Koki knows, they’re looking at Junno staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He cleans up without complaint, runs the water and splashes it over his face, looking up at himself as the water drips down his cheeks and chin. Along the line of his neck is a bruise, an imprint of Koki’s mouth and Junno half-smiles, and a laugh slips out as he traces a finger over it gingerly.  
  
Back in the room, Koki is still curled up and Junno cautiously climbs in next to him and Koki remembers this part. He remembers being woken up to someone enfolding him, wrapping long arms around him and pulling him tight, close. How it seemed ages before Koki came back to the present, hangover slicing right through his head along with sickness. Junno’s fingers are cool on his stomach, tracing comfortable half-asleep circles like they’d always been like this.  
  
He sighs, because it should feel like that. He should have been able to stay still, turn over and look Junno in the eye and it’s only seeing it now from Junno’s side that if Koki had turned over and smiled at him, nothing would have been ruined. The night before was all sorts of wrong, but just the openness and warmth of Junno touching him the morning after could have made it all right. Maybe.  
  
Koki twists out of his hold, grabbing the sheets to himself as he sits up and away and Junno pulls back like he’d been burned. Koki swears and he isn’t even so much as glancing at Junno when he gets up, grimacing at the mess.  
  
Junno can’t think what to say; Koki is distant and unapproachable like this, dropping the bedclothes on the floor and kicking them into a pile. Junno sits up and waits because whatever Koki says, that’s how they’ll move forward. He doesn’t care because he’s willing to let Koki take the lead here.  
  
And that’s when Koki turns on him, hand in his hair and looking determinedly casual as he says, “I drank  _way_  too much last night; must’ve blacked out. You’ve got to cut me off at some point, yeah?”  
  
And Junno doesn’t quite know what to reply except, “I didn’t think you were that drunk.”  
  
And Koki smiles, eyes darting off; deliberately avoiding the evidence of the bed. “Well, as you can see, I don’t remember anything, so…”  
  
“You  _do_  remember,” Junno says, and for a moment Koki thinks it was Junno in the memory who said it, but it’s the one drawing near to him now. “You know when you lied, you locked me out. How did you expect us to come back from that?” Accusatory.  
  
Koki watches memory Junno’s face; sees the mortified look freeze his features and he wishes he hadn’t lied that morning. Like any hindsight he’s had to look at today, he simply didn’t know how Junno felt. And he’d moved on and left Junno behind and the truth had been growing under them all along.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Koki says, completely genuine like he wouldn’t know how to be if Junno were really looking at him. “I’m so sorry.”  
  
It’s like someone shuts off the lights. Junno, who wouldn’t have let go of Koki for anything just then-- his fingers loosen and fall away. Koki is instantly alone in the dark.  
  
The black melts backward, seeping like drooling worms of a shadow tide. The image across the screen of his vision is the windshield of a car, passing familiar trees and pulling out of a parking lot and Koki knows this is moments after the fight. And he gets it entirely now. Gets it all. Yet, he can’t stop it; has to see it from beginning to end.  
  
He watches Junno’s hands turn the key in his apartment door and his thoughts are black, eroding, and jagged. He opens the door, kicks off his shoes blindly, shutting the door behind him. He draws into his living room and begins to pace; he starts to remove his jacket and scarf--throws them over the back of his couch in a sharp gesture-- walks a line up and down the room and he has virtually no expression. He’s tense and he’s beginning to breathe like he’s trying to expel something inside him. It’s nearly sunset and his entire front room is orange with the receding day and Junno’s eyes shut against it. He only opens them to walk around his couch, and he starts to look helplessly around at the empty room.  
  
Junno swears then, bitterly and voraciously, and Koki’s never heard him sound like that. Furious and practically paralysed by it. He pauses, fingers trailing on a bookshelf of comics, staring unseeingly out at something far off that he can’t stand the sight of. Right before his muscles tense and he pushes it down.  
  
Koki watches in horror as Junno systematically makes his way through his apartment kicking his table into the wall, pushing chairs over, knocking stray cups and magazines to the floor. He picks up a metal table leg, now snapped off its screws, and tosses it blindly and it strikes his balcony window, tiny cubes of sheer glass rain into the living room. Where his bookcase scatters all its contents, Junno drops to his knees, still staring off at nothing before his next breath comes with a low, despairing sound. At his knees are the comics, books and assorted magazines and he picks up one, gazing down at the cover as his fingers curl over the pages. Then, with one defining sweep, he tears the book in two. It’s eerily methodical; each book he pulls up from the pile, he rips and flings it, teeth clenched and his eyes wide.  
  
And then, everything is still.  
  
It’s strange to watch Junno straighten and catch his own eye in his mirror through his open bedroom door. He’s flushed and out of breath, looking around the room with an entirely different expression on his face. Wondering, lost, and scared.  
  
“What a—what a mess,” Junno whispers suddenly and watches his lips form the words in his reflection. ”Yeah, just look at it.” A long horrified pause. “Why did I do this?”  
  
Junno is speaking aloud; his regular voice making the statement seem so commonplace. However, Koki knows that this isn’t just the Junno he knows speaking anymore; at least Koki understands that whatever unbelievable thing had just happened, it’s somehow more believable that in this moment, Junno isn’t completely alone.  
  
“Well,” Junno murmurs and he sounds less despairing and more exasperated. “You do spend so much time, so much of everything you do; practically every other thought for what? Someone who behaves like he doesn’t care that you’re chipping away at your life.”  
  
“Stop.” His usual odd smile. And eerie in the silent mess of his apartment. “I’m not interested in this conversation.” He says it numbly  
  
“I’ve never seen you pursue something this unhealthy. It’s sick and you know it! He dismisses every honest feeling you’ve tried to share, all but rejects you. How can it feel to be so into someone who obviously doesn’t want you?”  
  
“It’s  _not_ ,” he interjects, mouth a new unhappy line. “…how it seems. He… has never been what he seems.”  
  
“Oh no, I know he  _wants_  you around. I can see he drinks up every little bit of attention you’ve got to give, but that’s all it’ll ever be. If he wants you, then it’s because you can be so cold and you can’t be that way all the time.”  
  
“No…no…” Aimless gestures, trying to spill meaning from his hands. “I know him. I  _know_  him and for everything he takes.” He smiles, for real this time, tired and sad. “The truth is I don’t even care what it does to me. I’ve got nothing else and this hurt will pass, and we’ll be all right. I’ve only ever wanted him to just see…”  
  
Junno drops his hands to the floor, palms in front of his knees as he tries with great visible effort to control his breathing. A pause comes over him like a strangled interlude. Koki is forcibly reminded of the mirror room and the other Junno’s cutting remarks; the things he was beginning to believe.  
  
“You want to know the truth?” he says to the floor at last in that carefully, parental tone and each word is tinged in venom.“Being around Koki isn’t about giving into the pain or the frustration or even the fact that for all you know, you’re not really that important to him.”  
  
“I don’t care,” is the staunch reply.  
  
“This isn’t masochism because you get masochism. You do. Masochism is selfless resolve; it’s ache and most of all, it’s loving the potential that someone better than you could still notice you in the dirt. The truth is that you’re too selfish for that. The truth is that sometimes you want to drag him down with you and what he gives of himself to you isn’t enough and you’ll always want more. You would give him all of you, of course, but you want to  _take_  every little bit of him in return.”  
  
“Why can’t I?” he asks desperately. “Why is that wrong if I don’t care about any of that?”  
  
“You don’t care because you want him to only ever look at you and you want him to see how absolutely wrecked you are over him and more than anything, you want him to understand that he is worth  _every little crack_  in your selfish, selfish heart.”  
  
Stunned silence and Junno raises his head, his eyes shimmering with unshed tears. Koki draws forward unthinkingly and in the broken catastrophe of both the room and Junno’s thoughts, Koki feels very present in the room.  
  
The room flickers, superimposed by a sea breeze and the taste of salt tears. The room is mixed with the back porch again and the imprint of the singular moment when a string, bright red, slips off Junno’s wrist. Koki looks up when Junno does and the balloon starts to float up in a white sky.  
  
“The truth is,” Junno chokes, watching the balloon drift far and away. “The truth is I let go of the string. I didn’t want to hang on because it was too much trouble; too much weight. And it’ll be OK; I’ll fix it. I’m not going to be selfish; I’m going to let go.”  
  
It seems a watery blend of colours all meld together over Koki. He watches Junno sit up and close his eyes tightly, and suddenly the room is filled with strings, fading in and all attached to balloons of different colours. Junno takes a deep breath and the strings snap, filling the room with the crack and whip of strings all around slipping from their hold. Koki is overcome, looking at each balloon swirled with colours like tie-dye and paint splatters. They’re going up, high, through a hole in the ceiling and leaving. The more the balloons fly, the more the tension leaves Junno’s shoulders.  
  
They’re him. Every single memory of him and Junno is somehow cutting them loose in this strange amalgamation of his apartment and that sunny day on his back porch and all Koki can think is a resounding  _no_.  
  
He doesn’t know what makes him do it, but one moment he’s a witness and the next he can hear his own footsteps as he runs to reach for the only thing he’s sure can stop this. A large umbrella, folded and leaned in the corner of the room. Barely breathing, he opens it over Junno’s head, standing on the tips of his toes to catch them, keep them in the cradle of the umbrella’s top. They resist and Koki hangs onto the handle tight, planting his feet down as the painted balloons gather.  
  
And Junno looks up, looks right up at him. He looks half-dazed like he’s dreaming and Koki shouts at him, “I can be just as selfish! And I don’t care either, so don’t you  _dare_ let go!”  
  
Junno stares at him in frightened awe, lips trembling. “OK,” he just says, compliant and desperate. “OK.”  
  
There’s a resounding ‘Pop!’ as the first balloon breaks where it floats, followed by a sporadic chain reaction from the others. Each balloon burst is a shower of paint and Koki drops the umbrella as the paint rains down on him and Junno, blinding them. Ink and colour crash in a flood over them just as Junno reaches for him. They grab on tight just as the room begins to cave on itself and the paint, thick and a blend of a rainbow, rushes over them like a river and pools around them, filling up like an ocean...  
  
They’re outside and his vision flickers like there’s a camera flash bulb behind his retinas, leaving him blinking against grains of film and green and magenta shadows. A tall black overarching tree stands in a field of ice-blue rose bushes over grass standing tall and waving in fresh breezes. Everything is glimmering and Koki can feel the ocean around his ankles, gulls and waves. The stretch to the fake horizon seems to bleed on forever, green grass and flashing colours like the rainbow was literally splattering the landscape in arbitrary bursts.  
  
“How did you…” Junno starts to say.  
  
Koki buries his face in Junno’s paint-drenched shirt and shuts his eyes tight. “I have no idea,” he answers.  
  
  


 

 

 

 

*

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Koki opens his eyes.  
  
The lab is exactly the way he left it and his whole body is stiff. There isn’t a single sound except for the receding bubbles of the Econtra-Lacuna Isolated Brain. He sits up, and grabs at the tube still attached to him. The remote is still clutched in his hand and he presses the button. Koki gasps out a sharp breath, realising that all of this is real with the sharp pain of the needle receding.  
  
It hits him when he sits up and he looks quickly around at Junno. Junno is very much awake and he’s sitting very still in that long dentist’s chair and he looks scared, gazing around at the wires attached to him.  
  
“Koki…” he murmurs in abrupt distress and looks through the glass of the brain’s case and spots him.  
  
He can only see half of Junno’s face from this angle and Koki can’t move; he’s afraid to. Junno blinks at him, eyes wandering over him through the red reflection of the glass and after a loaded, shocked and tense second, Koki sees Junno’s eyes squint up in a rapturous smile.  
  
“Hi, do I know you?” he says and can’t even wait half a second before he bursts out laughing.  
  
Koki raises his palms and covers his face because, right at that moment with Junno being his normal self plus just that extra bit of exasperating, it’s really hard for him not to smile back.  
  
  


 

 

 

 

*

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They had apparently only been under for something close to twenty minutes before an orderly came in to properly detach Junno, and by that time, Koki had managed to stem most of his nausea and it seemed all of the staff were none the wiser as they were escorted out.  
  
Koki gets behind the driver’s seat and was silent as Junno slipped in beside him, looking around a bit like a plane crash survivor would. He starts the car and doesn’t even think to ask where they’re going; he just puts it into drive and wheels onto the road.  
  
It’s nearly midnight and it’s a total trip looking out at the world racing past them and knowing it’s real. He watches yellow-red and brown leaves sweeping from black branches in front of a deep blue backdrop. Junno cracks a window and the scent in the air is crisp and cool with the scintillating decay of Fall.  
  
They only stop when Koki can’t drive anymore; they’re only halfway to where either of them live but it’s dark out and Junno mumbles something about wanting to just rest and get some air. They park at a curb just on the edge of a walkway towards a fishing dock and Koki lights up the minute they’re out, leaning against the hood.  
  
“Where’s my car?” Junno asks.  
  
Koki perches the cigarette on the edge of his lip as he lights it, looking pointedly distracted. “Still at the bar.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
Seagulls still stir at night and the steady rushing noise of the night air blankets their silence. Koki can feel Junno looking at him, and really, after all that, what could a person possibly say?  
  
“I love you,” Junno says.  
  
Koki’s cigarette drops from his fingers when his heart decides to go out of commission for a second. “God, you can’t just fucking  _say_  shit like that.” Each word blooms right in the center of his chest, sucks the life right out of him for a moment where he’s suddenly so happy he could probably implode. Koki sighs, rubbing his eyes fitfully, trying not to get roped in, but it’s always difficult when it’s Junno. “But maybe, possibly I do too…” he mutters.  
  
Junno steps back laughing, just loving that, which makes Koki helpless because it’s stupid and he didn’t think it’d happen this way or that he’d be this terribly happy when it did.  
  
“So I think we’ll be fine,” Koki tells him gruffly and Junno is still laughing as he reaches out for him.  
  
Koki tries not to lean in when Junno’s fingers play over the back of his neck. The sensation is still new and overwhelmingly intimate as though something about their contact while here, outside the very corridors of Junno’s head, makes it  _too_  real, too much truth in how he touches right in specific spots, the image Koki has of himself in a world that is all Junno’s. Koki twists around so he can see Junno’s expression and Junno has a distracted smile on his face, watching his fingers drag up Koki’s spine and his eyes meet Koki’s, pupils a-storm with several sharp points of electricity. Koki shivers and Junno exhales a soft, slow breath.  
  
“This keeps getting weirder and weirder,” Koki murmurs, searching his gaze.  
  
“Yeah, well,” Junno replies and drums the same fingers in a loving pattern as he leans in. Koki shuts his eyes instinctively and waits, feels the nearness of Junno, feels his hesitation and the way his fingertips on his back dig in like he’s not aware; only feeling the grooves of his spine as his lips hover over Koki’s. “Let me…” Junno whispers.  
  
“I  _am_  letting you,” Koki breathes.  
  
“I don’t…” and each touch of the word feathers over Koki’s lips. They’re not quite kissing and Koki can  _feel_  Junno looking at him, sharp close distance and as unsettling as the day Koki met him. “Just let me,” he begs.  
  
Koki loses patience and parts his lips over Junno’s, feeling like he’s falling backward in the dark. He’s put in an unchanging fall against the hood of his car when Junno’s hands close over his ribs and shift him up to sit atop. Everything’s more real than it normally feels, the heat of Junno more than lingering over the physical; it’s all over him and Koki-- in between these clear, blunt minutes of wanting everything about Junno at once—imagines what his mind must look like now; all a cluster of images, dreams, fears and most of all, the place where he’s going to keep this one memory.  
  
It probably looks a hell of a lot like Junno’s by now.


End file.
